You are here

Sidebar: Building a Website

19 January, 2016 - 15:32

In the early days of the World Wide Web, the creation of a website required knowing how to use hypertext markup language (HTML). Today, most websites are built with a variety of tools, but the final product that is transmitted to a browser is still HTML. HTML, at its simplest, is a text language that allows you to define the different components of a web page. These definitions are handled through the use of HTML tags, which consist of text between brackets. For example, an HTML tag can tell the browser to show a word in italics, to link to another web page, or to insert an image. In the example below, some text is being defined as a heading while other text is being emphasized.

media/image56.png
Figure 10.7 Simple HTML 
 
media/image57.png
Figure 10.8 Simple HTML output 
 

While HTML is used to define the components of a web page, cascading style sheets (CSS) are used to define the styles of the components on a page. The use of CSS allows the style of a website to be set and stay consistent throughout. For example, if the designer wanted all first-level headings (h1) to be blue and centered, he or she could set the “h1″ style to match. The following example shows how this might look.

media/image58.png
Figure 10.9 HTML with CSS 
 
media/image59.png
Figure 10.10 HTML with CSS output 
 

The combination of HTML and CSS can be used to create a wide variety of formats and designs and has been widely adopted by the web-design community. The standards for HTML are set by a governing body called the World Wide Web Consortium. The current version of HTML is HTML 5, which includes new standards for video, audio, and drawing.

When developers create a website, they do not write it out manually in a text editor. Instead, they use web design tools that generate the HTML and CSS for them. Tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver allow the designer to create a web page that includes images and interactive elements without writing a single line of code. However, professional web designers still need to learn HTML and CSS in order to have full control over the web pages they are developing.