HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and is how documents (web pages) are structured so that they appear a certain way in a web browser. When your web browser (Firefox / Chrome / Safari / etc...) receives an HTML document, it renders the markup into the "page" that you see.
Besides the Wikipedia article linked above, here are other resources for learning about HTML:
- Introduction to HTML -- This looks like a great starter resource that shows you how basic markup is rendered in the browser. It even has a live preview so that you can try things out and see how they appear.
- Introduction to HTML5 -- This comes from the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) and is more in-depth about the spec and compatibility of each of the tags. A good jumping off point might be this page that you can use to browse tags and use the in-line live preview to see how changes are rendered.
One of the great things about HTML and learning about how web pages are built and structured, is that you can always see what markup (HTML) the creator used by either viewing the source code:
Or using the Web Inspector:
Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) are used to apply /formatting/ to the document structure that you have defined with HTML. This is how you define things like the colors of the page, the font that is applied to the text on the page, and other positional concerns (e.g. this element appears on the left / center / right of the page).
- CSS Introduction -- Another resource from W3Schools, you can learn about how to define styles and how they apply to the elements in your document. They have a way of trying it out in your browser.
- Bootstrap -- A CSS framework from Twitter that enables you to build out pages that look nice without having to spend a bunch of time mucking with custom styles. This is probably what we'll start with to add some design elements to our application. Check out the examples for what is possible.
