Web fundamentals were something we went over pretty early in the Learn Verified course. Working at Bluehost, and having taken some HTML and CSS courses in the past, I felt like I already had a pretty good handle on web fundamentals. It wasn’t too bad. I still learned some handy things here and there, and it was a good refresher. Unlike previous courses, it led more into tools that are a bit more complex, like twitter’s creation, Bootstrap. That was really cool, because once you know some fundamentals, it can get extremely boring, and feel like drudge work writing so much code to make a web page. Turns out there are some really nice tools that give you a framework, so you can move much more quickly!
Really, almost anyone can learn web fundamentals – it’s a very popular introduction to coding. It’s a bit like putting puzzle pieces together. Normally, you want to plan out what you want your page to look like. What are the titles, and/or subtitles going to be? Where do you want images, or paragraphs, or videos, or links? Do you want multiple columns? What fonts do you want to use? Most computer-savvy people have a lot of experience with this sort of thing from Microsoft Word, or creating all kinds of other documents or presentations of information. Figuring out how you want everything to look is really the hard part. Once you’ve got those ideas sorted out, it turns out to be pretty easy to convert it into HTML and CSS code, which makes it into a web page. It just takes practice. This is what web fundamentals is all about.
The way you convert content into code, is simply surrounding it with things called tags. Have a title? Surround it with header tags, <h1></h1>. Same principle, with really any type of element. There are specific tags for pretty much any element on the page. This handles the basic formatting/positioning. Then there are extra things you can do with CSS. You basically start adding labels to those tags, and then you can specify different things to do to all elements labeled with that. You can start specifying fonts, colors, sizing, positioning, behavior when the mouse hovers over, or the browser gets resized, or the page is scrolled down, etc. The possibilities are limitless!
Many front-end developers memorize hundreds of tags and standard protocols for doing all kinds of things, and they can write this stuff fluently. Luckily, for the rest of us, there are tons of helpful resources and tips on the web that show exactly what you need to do to make things look a certain way. Web fundamentals is about learning the very basics – but many people make careers out of being able to do this sort of thing extremely well – and quickly. Once you know the fundamentals, you can read the code, and see how everything is done, on almost any web page, fairly easily. But it takes a lot of work and practice to be able to put all the pieces together in the first place.
It’s really satisfying, because web browsers can instantly translate all that code into something you can see, and you can watch your creation grow, and become better looking, basically as you code. Back-end coding, while very satisfying in its own way, doesn’t give this kind of feedback. You can spend all day working on something, and nothing looks any different! With web fundamentals, you immediately see results from pretty much every line of code you write. It’s pretty cool.