HTML & CSS Crash Course

HTML & CSS, HTML means Hypertext Markup Language. Its basically just a text file with codes that tell the browser how to display the information. For example, you can let the browser know that a certain string of text should be displayed as a header with bold font, or that the text should be centered on the page.

To let the browser know the text file contains HTML, we use the file extension .html rather than .doc or .txt or .rtf

Since a HTML document is nothing but a text file, you can use any text editor to make one.

You can use Microsoft Word, Pages, or your built in text editors provided by the operating system. However if you are a Mac user I’m going to recommend a special HTML editor which is free called Kompozer.

The nice thing about Kompozer is that it allows you to preview your file in real time inside the application without having to save your html file and loading it in a browser. Although in this book we will be focusing on teaching HTML and CSS, Kompozer allows WYSWYG editing of web pages.

CSS means cascading style sheet. It is simply a file that goes along with your html file which specifies the look and formatting of the html file. We will illustrate this with a simple example.

First, create a file called thecssfile.css and place it in the same folder as your html file.

we will see how to specify how text with certain tags appears – what font is used, what style, and what size.