A Short Intro to Web Development

Video Description

My name is Mazvita Ngorosha. This video is my submission for The Science Ambassador Scholarship 2019. Below is the transcript for my lesson. Hi! My name is Mazvita Ngorosha. If you need to find out information about another country, there’s a website for that too! Right now, you are watching me on a website, YouTube. There are about 1.5 billion plus websites on the web and you might be wondering, how does a website become a website? This is where HTML, CSS and JavaScript come in. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are languages used in web development. First, let's look at HTML. HTML is the standard markup language for creating web pages and stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. An HTML document has a document type declaration, a head and body. It is made up of elements and these elements are the building blocks of a webpage. HTML allows you to create paragraphs, add links, images, buttons, lists, tables, and many more. Tags such as the heading, body and paragraph surround the element’s content. Most tags have an opening and closing tag that tell where the content starts and ends. When creating a webpage, HTML is going to be the tool for the actual content of the page, such as text. We have all ended up on a plain web page that is boring and bland. This is where CSS comes in. CSS beautifies the plain text into the nicely structured and styled websites we like. CSS is an acronym for Cascading Style Sheets and it styles HTML content with colors, textures, sizes, fonts, backgrounds and many more designs that make websites aesthetically pleasing. There are three types of CSS. There is inline CSS and internal CSS which are contained in the HTML file. Another type is the external CSS which is contained in a separate .css file and then linked to the HTML file. All three types of CSS have rules that have a selector and a declaration block. A selector refers to the HTML element that is being styled. The declaration block declares the specific styles being applied to the HTML element. When combined, HTML and CSS create a webpage with styled content. Although websites made with HTML and CSS are sufficient, interactive elements add to the functionality of the website and JavaScript is the tool for the job. JavaScript is a programming language that can change and update HTML and CSS. It is comprised of data types and structures, functions and more. JavaScript adds interactive behavior and processes requests and responses on a website. Together HTML, CSS and JavaScript create functional and dynamic websites. Web Development has other steps that I did not discuss such as finding a host platform for the website, securing and maintaining the website. If you are interested in building your own website, definitely try out coding in HTML and CSS and if you are like me, you will probably enjoy it too. Thanks you so much for watching.