vintagerecords wrote in htmlcsslove

the basics

Okay, to get his community started, I'm gonna go ahead and start off with the basics. Just a basic explanation of what HTML & CSS are, because, trust me, that'll help you out a lot later on. So, lets begin with

Okay, well let's start off with HTML, because it's the easiest. =)
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language; is a markup language used to structure text and multimedia documents and to set up hypertext links between documents, used extensively on the World Wide Web.

HTML is used all the time in webpages, journal entries, and a lot of places on the WWW. You probably use a bit of HTML everyday, you just might not realize it. In HTML, you're telling your text what to do. You can tell your text to


  • bold,
  • italisize,
  • underline,
  • superscript,
  • subscript,
  • change font size/color/face
  • and a hell of a lot more

Does that make it a bit easier to understand what HTML is?


HTML is a Hypertext Markup Lanuguage used widely on the Web, and it basically tells your text what to do. Now, if you want to edit ONE link, or ONE sentence, you'd use HTML; but if you want to change ALL the text that is in a certain part of your page, (i.e all links, or ALL bolded text, etc), you use CSS.

CSS: Cascading Style Sheets is an extension to HTML to allow styles,
e.g. colour, font, size to be specified for certain elements
of a hypertext document. Style information can be included
in-line in the HTML file or in a separate CSS file (which can
then be easily shared by multiple HTML files). Multiple
levels of CSS can be used to allow selective overriding of
styles.

CSS is what you'd use to override your MySpace, or your LiveJournal. It's code you assign to a specific part of a webpage, and it affects that entire part. (Ex. If I use CSS to change/edit ALL the bold text on my WebPage, then everytime I use HTML to bold my text, it'll look exactly how I assigned it to, in my CSS coding.)

I will have a test webpage just for this community, and it will be kind of a visual aide, so that you can have a better understand of what HTML/CSS does and the ways it affects your webpage. I highly recommend that you get your own test webpage, so you can test out new codes, play with them, etc. A good place to get a free, easy-to-use, webpage is here. The webpage I will be using for testing codes is located here.

Questions/Comments/Concerns/Suggestions/Etc?
Then, feel free to email me or comment on the entry.

explanation

LJ Video