Coding 101: 5 Reasons Why You Should Start With HTML

Chirag Ramachandra's photo
Chirag Ramachandra
·

4 min read

A lot of students, who want to become programmers generally think “why should I learn HTML ?”. I mean HTML is not a programming language in itself. To put it in simple words, it is a set of instructions for your browsers to show websites.

What is HTML? TLDR: HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a language that web browsers understand which is used to define parts of web pages or mobile apps.

Expanding on the above points:

HTML is the standard markup language for creating Web pages. HTML tells browsers which part of a webpage is a header, which is a footer, where paragraphs belong, where images, graphics, and videos are placed. HTML is the universally accepted standard through which web crawlers and search engines index your website. Web Browsers (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc) translate the markup such that the content is visible on your browser screen. Basic structure of HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Your Page Title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
   <h1>My First Heading</h1>
   <p>My first paragraph.</p>
  </body>
</html>

Now that you know what it is about, here are 5 reasons why you should start with HTML

HTML is the first step towards a solid coding foundation Once you learn HTML, you can move on to learn much more interesting technologies like CSS (to design webpages), Javascript (to manipulate HTML elements), JQuery (an easier way to manipulate HTML elements), ReactJS (Frontend Framework).

Very easy to learn If you are a beginner, HTML is the easiest thing to learn in web development. The concepts are pretty simple and laid out in layman’s terms. HTML’s learning curve is not steep and is definitely beginner friendly

Instant gratification If you are someone who likes instant gratification, HTML is a friend of yours. You can instantly see the changes that you do in your program, the same cannot be said for components like Ruby on Rails, Python, etc

P.s: This point is debatable, but in my opinion, it is much easier to toy around with HTML and see the changes in the result instantly

Zero setup required Unlike React, Python or LAMP(XAMP) technlogies, you need not have to do complex installations.

All you need is a text editor (I prefer, Visual Studio Code) and that is it! START CODING

Everything boils down to HTML You may master front end technologies like React JS/ Angular JS / Vue JS but at the end of the day all of these technologies boil down to html or DOM manipulation. Hence it is very important for you to know atleast the very basics of HTML

NOW, WHERE DO I LEARN HTML? I have spoken extensively about why to learn, now lets come to where to learn HTML. Here is my list of top 5 places to learn HTML (hover and click to access):

Codeacademy Khan Academy W3schools Udemy Traversy Media That is it for today. Let’s get started!