HTML & CSS Essentials For Dummies

Chapter 1

Getting to Know HTML and CSS

IN THIS CHAPTER

Finding out a bit about what you’re getting yourself into

Befriending HTML

Introducing yourself to CSS

This book is a sort of manual for using HTML and CSS. However, and this is particularly true if you’re just getting started with coding web pages, if there’s any part of the book that fits the old RTFM (read the freakin’ manual) credo, it’s this chapter. Everything you learn in this chapter acts as a kind of home base for the explorations that come later.

In this chapter, you learn the basic concepts behind HTML and CSS, get a better understanding of how they work, and get started exploring these powerful technologies.

Getting a Bird’s-Eye View of the Process

You can add special codes inside a text file to specify how you want your web page to look. For example, maybe you want a particular collection of words or phrases to appear as a bulleted list. When the web browser comes to that part of the file, it dutifully renders those items as a list, bullets and all. The person browsing your page doesn’t get the “render these items as a bulleted list” code; they just get the bulleted list. The web browser performs these and many ...