Introduction

First steps

Hi there! 👋🏽

Welcome to the beginning of this journey into web development. Before delving into more complex stuff, we think it’s super important that you get familiarized with one of the most fundamental tools you need for programming on the web, HTML.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and it is actually pretty simple. It is primarily used to structure your document considering the semantic meaning each element is going to have in it (Is it a paragraph, a heading? Is it a bulleted list? Is it part of a table?), the distribution of it from a logical perspective (Does it have a header? Three columns of content? A navigation menu?) and the embed content it might have (Is it going to contain an image, a piece of audio or a video?).

We don't want to start boring you with the history of it, and there's plenty of documentation on the internet about its origin, so briefly quoting Wikipedia, we'll just say that HTML was born in 1989, when Tim Berners-Lee (considered the father of the web) wrote a memo proposing an Internet-based hypertext system. Berners-Lee specified HTML and wrote the browser and server software in late 1990. The first publicly available description of HTML was a document called "HTML Tags", first mentioned on the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee in late 1991. It describes 18 elements comprising the initial, relatively simple design of HTML. From there, the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) created an HTML Working Group, which in 1995 completed HTML 2.0 the first HTML specification intended to be treated as a standard against which future implementations should be based.

And enough talk! Now let's see what we expect from you while learning everything this incredible world has to offer. Off we go!

Goals

This is just an illustrative list to show you what should you have learned by the end of this section. It would be nice if before crossing each one of them out, you could repeat out loud or do by yourself what it is written in the list. Don't worry though if some are too abstract, or you need help. Remember that you will have the time and people to ask any doubt you might have.

• Learn and understand how to use basic tags
• How to place comments in HTML
• Nest tags and understand its relationship
• Use hyperlinks to navigate from one document to another
• Insert images in an HTML document
• Create a semantic layout in HTML
• Create a fully working form with HTML

Basic tools

To carry out the activities in this module you can use any modern web browser. Just as a reminder, we recommend you download the Mozilla web browser, as we mentioned in the Prework module. Of course, feel free to use any browser you feel more comfortable with, this is just a recommendation considering that we're going to be developing for the web.

Apart from that, you'll need to have in your computer some IDE to write your code. You should have done this in the Prework module, so in case you haven't done it yet, just refer to that part of the material and install it now.

And last but not least, you'll need to create an account in freeCodeCamp. This website offers several courses in web development for free with tons and materials and exercises. You'll be doing lots of exercises there, so it's better if you have an account to track your progress!