Sasha Vodnik, Author at 足球竞彩网 Assembly Blog

HTML for Web Development: Building the Bones of Your Website

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Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, is a programming language used to describe the structure of information on a webpage. Together, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?make up the essential building blocks of websites worldwide, with?CSS controlling a page¡¯s appearance and?JavaScript programming its functionality.

Why Is HTML Important?

You can think of HTML development as providing the bones of a webpage, while CSS provides the skin, and JavaScript provides the brains. A webpage can contain headings, paragraphs, images, videos, and many other types of data. Front-end developers use the HTML element to specify what kind of information each item on a webpage contains ¡ª for instance, the ¡°p¡± HTML element indicates a paragraph. Developers also write HTML language code to specify how different items relate to one another in the page¡¯s overall structure or document structure.

Every website you open in your web browser, from social networks to music services, uses HTML. A look under the hood of any website would reveal a basic HTML code page, written with an HTML structure editor, providing structure for all the page¡¯s components, including its header element, footer element, main content, and other inline elements.

A look at the HTML code that structures 足球竞彩网 Assembly¡¯s website.
A look at the HTML code that structures 足球竞彩网 Assembly¡¯s website.

How HTML Works in a Webpage

The HTML file plays a couple of significant roles in a webpage. First, we use the structure created by our HTML code to reference, enhance, and manipulate elements on a web page using?CSS?and?JavaScript. For instance, you could use HTML to mark all of the headings on a web browser page, then pick the size and color you want to apply to those headings to reflect your organization’s branding, or simply a visual design developed for the site.
Second, HTML text lets us indicate the roles of different structural elements to search engines and other services that index the content and summarize it for other users. For instance, marking the caption of an image with the “figcaption” element and enclosing the image and its caption in the “figure” meta element helps a search engine understand that these two pieces of content are related and that the caption describes the associated image.

Learning HTML at 足球竞彩网 Assembly

Whether you want to land a job as a front-end or?full-stack web developer?or just want to dip your toe into programming, HTML is a natural place to start. Learning HTML, along with CSS and basic?JavaScript, provides you with the fundamental skills necessary to create your interactive single-page website.

In GA¡¯s part-time courses in?Front-End Web Development?and?HTML, CSS & Web Design, and our career-changing, full-time?Web Development Immersive program, you¡¯ll get hands-on practice coding your projects, from static personal and business websites to single-page applications like games and interactive photo galleries.

These projects give you practice using basic HTML tags and structuring pages with different components, including headers, footers, sidebars, and navigation. You¡¯ll also code CSS and JavaScript?and learn how to put all three together to build websites that implement modern standards and use best practices for front-end development.

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Meet Our Expert

Sasha Vodnik?is a front-end web developer and author who teaches?Front-End Web Development?and?JavaScript Development?at 足球竞彩网 Assembly¡¯s?San Francisco?campus. He also writes books on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and creates video courses through Lynda.com.

¡°I love meeting students from a wide variety of industries, with a whole spectrum of goals, from all over the world. I¡¯m continually inspired by the thoughtful, creative projects they build in the course that showcase their new skills and unique vision.¡±

¨C Sasha Vodnik, Front-End Web Development Instructor, 足球竞彩网 Assembly San Francisco

JavaScript for Web Development: Building an Interactive Website

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JavaScript is essential to nearly every action you take online, whether it¡¯s entering credit card information, streaming videos and music, or interacting on social networks, just for starters. It¡¯s the programming language used to make webpages interactive ¡ª and it¡¯s perhaps the most widely used language because of it.

Developers use?JavaScript?to create a wide range of features, from simple?user interface?(UI) functionality to complex visual effects, including:

  • Interfaces like image carousels.
  • News feeds that continue to load new information as you scroll through them.
  • The ability to submit information entered into a Google Doc, survey form, or online payment system.

Features like these are part of a website¡¯s?front-end code, which is responsible for what users see and interact with. Front-end JavaScript code runs in a user¡¯s browser, where it¡¯s integrated with the?HTML?code that makes up a page¡¯s structure and the?CSS?code that specifies how each of the page¡¯s elements should be displayed.

But not all JavaScript is written for the front end. Developers can also use it for a website¡¯s back end, which is executed on servers, or specialized computers that run websites behind the scenes.

JavaScript allows developers to perform many basic tasks common to a wide variety of programming languages. For instance, conditional logic allows a developer to specify that a section of code should be executed only if a certain condition is met. Imagine you were creating a webpage that accessed weather information for the user¡¯s current location, and then displayed an icon representing the current temperature. You might use a conditional statement to specify that if the temperature is below freezing, the screen should display an image of an icicle.

Conditional Statement

JavaScript developers can organize their code a couple different ways. One approach, known as functional programming, organizes code into functions, which are sets of JavaScript statements that take values as input and return results. Another technique, known as object-oriented programming, groups values and code together into collections known as objects.

A basic familiarity with JavaScript gives you a strong foundation for building applications with popular frameworks such as?React, Angular, and Vue, and libraries like?jQuery. Frameworks and libraries are pre-written collections of JavaScript code that make it easier for you to build your own applications. While using a framework or a library can allow you to program without needing to write the code for some tasks yourself, a foundation in?JavaScript coding?without frameworks or libraries ¡ª known as vanilla JavaScript ¡ª can be a great asset in customizing your apps and debugging them when things aren¡¯t working exactly as you expect.

JavaScript at 足球竞彩网 Assembly

At 足球竞彩网 Assembly, JavaScript is a core part of all of our?web development courses. It¡¯s one of the central technologies covered in our full-time?Web Development Immersive?and?Web Development Immersive Remote?programs, in which students prepare for a career in?full-stack web development. You can focus exclusively on the language in our part-time?JavaScript Development?course (also available?online), or get a basic introduction to how JavaScript fits with?HTML?and?CSS?in our part-time?Front-End Web Development?course.

GA instructors help students build JavaScript skills step by step, sharing knowledge and best practices they¡¯ve accumulated as developers in the field. In addition to in-class exercises and homework, students also apply their new knowledge by building projects that make use of all the tools they¡¯ve learned. Students leave with portfolio-worthy projects that demonstrate their new skills, as well as next steps for building apps with JavaScript and learning more about the language.

Ask a Question About Our Coding Programs

Meet Our Expert

Sasha Vodnik?is a front-end web developer and author who teaches?Front-End Web Development?and?JavaScript Development?at 足球竞彩网 Assembly¡¯s?San Francisco?campus. He also writes books on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and creates video courses through LinkedIn Learning.

¡°I aim to help students recognize what they already know and connect it to what they¡¯re trying to do. At GA, we teach how to troubleshoot and find answers so you can grow as a developer long after you leave the classroom.¡±

¨C Sasha Vodnik, JavaScript Development Instructor, 足球竞彩网 Assembly San Francisco