Guide: Getting started - Concepts

👉 If you haven't done so yet, go to the Tooling Guide and get yourself a Glitch account, which you can use to exercise the topics in this Guide.

Websites (and many other kinds of applications) are made up of HTML, CSS and Javascript. These are languages allow us to tell the browser what to show, how it will look like and how each part should behave.

HTML defines what should be shown on the screen and in which hierarchy, like a paragraph, a list containing a dozen items, an image, etc.

CSS defines how things look like. For example, if the color of a text should be purple or if an element should be always in the top right corner.

Javascript defines how things should behave. For example, if a message should appear if I click a button, or if more images should be loaded as the user approaches the end of an image list.

These three technologies alone compose the basis of almost all of the work we will go through in this course, and therefore should be well studied, understood and mastered.

By far, Javascript is the most complex and powerful of the three, so we will be spending more time learning it.

Many other powerful tools you will study and use were created with these three technologies, which expose how simplicity can give way to a complex and vibrant ecosystem as the web development community.