fullstack_webdev

Code and notes from Full stack web developer path, LinkedIn Learning.

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1. HTML ESSENTIAL TRAINING

0. What is HTML?

1. Role of HTML

2. Formatting Text in HTML

<p>This is paragraph tag.</p>
<h1>Level 1 headline</h1>
<article>This is an article</article>

<p>This paragraph has <em>text that's emphasized</em>for effect.</p>

<time>May 8, 2025</time>
<br />
<time>8 May 2025</time>

<elementname attributename="attribute-value"> for date we do it as <time datetime="2025-05-08">May 8, 2025</time>. The time inside the datetime attribute needs to be in a particular format. There’s a specific machine readable format for dates and time and machine readable version is YYYY-MM-DD. Some of the examples are

<time datetime="2025-05-08">May 8</time>
<time datetime="2025-05-08">May 8, 2025</time>
<time datetime="2025-05-08">8 May 2025</time>

We don’t have to write date on webpage, most of the websites uses time stamps, with phrases such as 5 hours ago, 10 days ago etc. But still for machines we follow the date format.

<time datetime="2021-10-05">2 days ago </time>
<time datetime="2021-10-08">Tomorrow</time>
<time datetime="07:00">7:00 am</time>
<time datetime="20:15">08:15 pm</time>
<time datetime="12:00">Half past noon</time>
<!-- TIME: hh-mm-ss.ddd -->
<time datetime="14:15:28.5">14:15:28.5</time>
<!-- TIMEZONE in Time: hh-mm-ss.ddd+-hh:mm -->
<time datetime="15:45-05:00">3:45 pm in New York</time>
<!-- 03:45 PM and -5 hours from GMT -->

<!-- Date and time together, where date comes first -->
<time datetime="2020-11-04 19:00-0500">Wednesday, Nov 4th at 7PM</time>

<br>: To leave some lines space on a webpage, we use br. It stands for a line break. <br> doesn’t contain any content just marks line break.

<pre>: Used to preserve the spacing and indent defined in html doc and display it on webpage without change.

H<sub>2</sub>O
<br />
Something that has footnote.<sup>2</sup>

For mathematics on webpage one should look into MathML, a specialized markup language for math and it is more powerful than what HTML can do.

To mark something such as copyright information and other minor information that needs to be there, but not as main content, we put that in <small>.

3. Understanding the Power of HTML

Desktop Browsers these days have a secret cockpit of sort which contains information about what’s happening with a website’s code and performance related metrics. To open web developer tools we can either right click on webpage and click inspect element or we can go to Tools > Web Developer > Inspector. This will open up developer tools on Mozilla Firefox. You would see inspector tab along with other tabs such as Console, Debugger, Network, Style Editor, Performance etc.

There are 3 panes in Inspector tab, leftmost for html, middle pane for CSS and rightmost for fonts, and other settings.

In inspector HTML section we can see the DOM the browser has created for the web page and this is the code to display the webpage. We can use DOM tools to inspect any website on the internet and see how other developers are designing their sites. This is how you can decide when you aren’t too sure about what markup to use, go to the site that has content similar to what you are trying to implement and then use dev tools to find out what elements that site uses.

We can also use HTML Inspector to find mistakes in our code and debug it with page and code side by side. If you are not sure what’s happening, check developer tools in a browser to sort things out.

We have only looked at basics of HTML so far, to add more power to any element using an attribute. Some attributes are element specific and work with only a specific kind of element, e.g. datetime attribute of time element.

Global attributes, these are the attributes that can be applied to any HTML element. 4 of the most useful ones attributes are:

  1. Class: Allows us to target all elements with that class in our CSS or JS code.
<p class="intro">This is introduction.</p>
  1. ID: Allows us to target a unique element with that id in our CSS of JavaScript. ID is similar to class but we can only allowed to use unique names once in an entire HTML page. We can used an ID for targeting CSS but it’s much more specific and that can be a problem, so due to this most of the time CSS devs try sticking to classes as much as they can.

IDs are particularly helpful to address particular elements with JavaScript or with a targeted link. The fact that there will ever be only one element with one particular ID name, becomes useful when interacting with JS or links as it helps to pin point that particular element.

Irrespective of use case, class and ID attributes give us a way to name certain HTML elements and to be able to refer them in other parts of the stack up code.

Other attributes that do things can be contenteditable="true" which allows the visitor to a page edit the content of the page. HTML only allows to display the user entered data in an editable element, backend developers still need to find a way for that content to be captured and saved.

  1. lang: Lang attribtue tells the browser which language the content is in.

  2. dir: This attribute tells the browser specifically in which direction the text flows, it could be left to right or right to left (rtl).

There is a list of all global attributes on MDN web docs.

<p class="intro" id="article-intro">This is introduction.</p>
<p dir="ltr" lang="fr">Ce paragraphe est definit en francais.</p>

ARIA roles arae another kind of attribute that can be added to any HTML element to give it more meaning and to make sure what browser understands what something is. Ideally, we won’t need an ARIA role. If we use the proper HTML element we will communicate the right message about the semantics of web page.

As in many places it is illegal to make websites inaccessible to people with disabilities. Yeah HTML can be a Human Rights issue. ARIA roles are html attributes that provide accessible information about a specific element. Layer of information conveyed by ARIA tells screen readers, braille displays, magnifiers and other assistive technology things they need to know to make a site fully accessible.

ARIA was invented around the time when more and more web started to replace the web applications. It is especially useful in making sure the functionality of a complex interface in an app if fully usable by everyone.

In accessibility tab of firefox, we can see accessibility tree. Browser takes the original HTML and uses it to build DOM tree and from DOM tree browser builds the accessibility tree. Accessibility tree is what assitive devices use to provide an experience of the website through a screen reader.

aria-hidden="true" removes the element and its children from accessibility tree, it stays in DOM tree but removed for assistive devices. We want h1 to be seen by accessibility tree.

<h1 aria-label="Hello World">
  <div class="grid" aria-hidden="true">
    <span>H</span>
    <span>e</span>
    <span>l</span>
    <span>l</span>
    <span>o</span>
    <span>W</span>
    <span>o</span>
    <span>r</span>
    <span>l</span>
    <span>d</span>
  </div>
</h1>

Look into aria roles if you are in a team that’s struggling to write proper semantic HTML or if you are building a complex application interface.

ARIA roles provides you tools needed to make your site accessible for everyone.

HTML doesn’t care about space, tabs etc. but exception being when we use <pre>, <code> or <textarea> element or if we use CSS to change how whitespace is handled, in that case extra space, indentations can count. Most of the time browser ignores everything to do with spacing and puts one space automatically.

Commenting your code to explain what’s going on for increased maintainability is a good idea too.

Doesn’t matter if you capitalize or not your html tags, though more generally these days we see html being written with lowecase elements. Browsers support lower and uppercase.

HTML was invented in late 80s and 90s where computer scientists wanted to keep the code as small as they can, that’s why some of the tags like <i> are really small but newer elements such as <article> <video> etc. use whole english words for increased readability instead of saving bits of space.

Newer HTML elements always have opening and closing tags like the video element which we will cover in chapter 6. Some old tags have no closing such as <img> tag. Lter on, the best practice changed to have a symbolic / around the element that didn’t have a closing tag so <img src="file.jpg"> became <img src="file.jpg" /> it signifies element opens and closes itself.

<, > and & characters are used by us to write HTML, but what if we want to show them on webpage? Sometimes these characters won’t show up on webpage and that layer between html code and what you want on webpage gets merged and due to this reason we use what’s called a character entity. HTML entities are formatted like this &<some-short-code>;. E.g. &lt; for <, &gt; for >, &amp; for &.

We type these character entities in HTML file and these gets converted on the webpage. W3C keeps track of all the character entities where you can mark them up.

HTML Entities can also be helpful for typing characters that aren’t on your keyboard. E.g. &copy; for © &trade; for ™, &star; for &star;.

Non breaking space: Normally space provides opportunities for sites to be responsive and lines of text to break, words stay whole and when there’s not enough space for a whole sentence, the browser looks for a place to wrap the line of text. We can insert a non breaking space &nbsp; between 2 words instead of regular space and the browser will know to not break the line there and prevents unwanted wrapping. E.g. Anmol&nbsp;Tomer.

Non breaking space can also be used to force the browser to put more than one space, as browser by default ignores more than one space, so this is a good hack.

4. Linking and Navigation

We take links on webpages for granted, these days. The way link actually helped set the idea of web is actually profound. How one would make a link is really simple though. To make a link we use the anchor <a> element. E.g. <a href="page.html">Link</a>. On opening tag we need href attribute that holds the address of website or link you want to visit and the text contains shows up the link to that address and then we close the anchor element.

<a href="www.google.com">Google</a>

Between opening and closing a tags we can put text, image, usually both that we want to be clickable. By default a element is an inline element. We can also put a link around more complex elements such as a teaser card and emojis etc.

href attribute can have absolute URLs i.e. complete address of a site/page on the internet or they can be used to link particular sections of the site we are on as well.

HTTP vs HTTPS: Hyptertext Transfer Protocol, this is the way that everything on the web talks to everything else. The protocol, the rules of the communication system and was invented during the 80s when the web was invented.

HTTPS stands for Hyptertext Transfer Protocol Secure. Originally all web addresses were HTTP, today all the experts agree every website should be using HTTPS instead.

Absolute URLs are one of the ways to form a link, instead when we are linking to a section that’s on the same site, or page that has the link, at that time we can use what’s known as a relative URL. Say you are building https://www.awesomefootball.com and I am working on a local copy of the site adding a menu bar on the website. When we are working locally we want all the links to connect to the local copy of the files.

When we put the website on a testing server at that time we want all the links to point at pages and files on testing server, we want a method to leave out the awesomefootball.com part of the URL and have the browser still know where to find the files.

Creating a relative URL isn’t just useful for the a element, this is a skill we will use to point to image files, video files, css, javascript files and anytime we specify path to a file.

How to form a URL from scratch?: We have to understand how our file are organized and what’s the root directory and what’s your working directory. E.g. /images/logo.gif is a url relative to root level whereas if we do ../images/logo.gif then it is relative to the file where url is typed out.

If you type out https://www.awesomefootball.com/people/ then remember that everytime we type out the folder path and leave it without pointing to an html file then browser automatically looks for index.html file, in this case it will find and try to load https://www.awesomefootball.com/people/index.html. index.html is a special file name this gives us a way to make our URLs pretty or clean. Instead of creating a file name people.html we can create a folder called people and inside that folder we can put a file named index.html. This trick only works for HTML files, and don’t do something like this with CSS, or iamges.

Trailing /: It doesn’t matter if we include it or not if there is nothing to enter after trailing /. E.g. the following three point and behave in the same manner

<li><a href="/people/index.html">People</a></li>
<li><a href="/people/">People</a></li>
<li><a href="/people">People</a></li>

Using relative URLs can be super helpful on a project that moves from server to server while it is being worked on.

Now that we have seen how to make links and how to structure our URLs, let’s look at some of the most common ways to structure our URLs, some of the most common patterns for creating a menu or navigation bar. Say we want to make a main menu bar for our website

<nav role="nav">
  <ul class="navbar">
    <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/people"></a>People</li>
    <li><a href="/prices">Prices</a></li>
    <li><a href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
  </ul>
</nav>

<nav>: Nav element is used for marking up navigation, it tells the browser which set of links are part of site navigation. We don’t use it all the time, but only for a major blocks of navigational links.

We want screenreaders and other assistive devices to also know that this is the main menu for the site, so we will add few attributes to convey the purpose of this navigation bar. We add role="navigation" attribute in nav element, it is an aria role that is perfect for marking the main navigation of the page. aria-label of main menu it provides a label that can be read aloud by screenreaders to tell people what this is and to give them more context.

Example of footer is as follows:

<footer>
  <a href="/about/privacy">Privacy Policy</a>
  <a href="/about/legal">Terms of Service</a>
</footer>

5. Images

The web is a web of text and images. We use <img/> element to put an image on the webpage. There are 4 attribtues we have to include for every img element and these are as follows:

  1. <src>: Tells browser which image file to load, we provide path to image here.
  2. <alt>: Acts as substitute for the image, whenever image is not loaded then this text is displayed, ideally this should be description of the image such as “Real Madrid team after winning champions league, LtR: Marcelo, Ronaldo, Ramos.” Screenreaders read the alt text, this is what they experience of this image. Alt text can be funny or poetic, needn’t necessarily be dry. If there’s nothing for people to know about this image, then we can leave it blank. In cases if we not include alt attribute there are chances that image file name could be read out and this would lead to poor UX since image names are really long at times as the images are hosted on AWS S3.
  3. <width>:Width of image. By default it means pixels. Order of attributes doesn’t matters in HTML.
  4. <height>: Specify height of image in pixels.

If we instead tell the browser how big the image is, then it doesn’t have to wait for entire image to load, rather it takes the width and height, browser has a split second head start in calculating the layout. You might have seen that when you try to read an article with a slow internet connection that layout changes and paragraphs jump up and down as more and more images load, if you include the height and width attributes on webpage will fix this issue too.

To put an image on webpage, image has to be in a file format that the web browsers will understand, there are several options when it comes to formats of image, we keep inventing new image formats in a quest between tiny size and gorgeous looking images. We want as much data as possible to make the site good looking, while having as little data as possible so that images load faster. Goal is to have High Quality + Small File Size.

Each file format takes different approach towards this goal. 4 file formats commonly used on web today, each is good at compressing certain kind of images, and these are as follows:

  1. GIF: Does well compressing large areas of single color, limited color space of 256 colors, can make photographs pixelated, bad choice for photographs, unless you are looking for a retro look, can have multiple frames giving feel of a little movie.

  2. SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics, images of this format are great for icons, logos and other kinds of illustration. Here instead of files made up of pixels, it is a vector file, it contains instructions for a drawing, as SVGs are made up of vector and math, these images can scale to be physically quite large or very small without ever losing any quality. SVG image won’t get pixelated because there aren’t any pixels, this makes the file size very small. If you can use an SVG, then definitely go for it. You can export SVG from illustrator.

  3. JPG: This is a great format for compressing photoographs, most digital cameras infact save photos that you shoot as JPG files. When you put a JPG image on the web you want to make sure that either a human or robot resizes the iamge to an apt physical size and compresses it for the web.

  4. PNG: PNGs are newer format for the web than GIFs or JPGs, they are a good solution when you have a photograph and you need part of the photo to be transparent. PNG sometimes does a better job than GIF at compressing the kind of images that the GIF format likes.

Consider the physical size of an image, the file format and the compression settings when making your image files.

Sometimes we want to display a big beautiful high-resolution image for people with big screens and then shrink it way down for people on smaller screens. CSS can do this, where one image file can be shown at any size. The problem is, a big high resolution image contains millions of pixels and all that data can make the file size pretty big, which takes a lot of time to download on the internet connection with a slow speed and can use up a huge chunk of data plans, and in some markets cost them a lot of money.

We don’t want to deliver, unwanted high resolution data to small screens. This is where we use html, to deliver different size image based on device screen size. We can make several different files and list them as a set of options in HTML and let the browser decide which image to download, it can do so in coordination with the OS, while taking the device hardware capabilities and network speed into account as well.

More and more screens these days are not 1x, rather there are screens with pixel densite 2x, 3x and 4x screens these days. The simplest way to support these screens of different resolutions is to create multiple copies of our image in different resolutions and then tell the browser that those copies are available, the device can then decide what it wants to do, after looking at the screen density, the network connection, the user settings and decide which image to use. Even if someone has a high resolution screen the browser might decide to download

srcset: This attribute is used with img element where we pass in the different images and size such as 2x, 3x etc, so that browser can decide what image should be shown based on screen size.

<img
  src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/10558/dog-480.jpg"
  srcset="
    https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/10558/dog-960.jpg  2x,
    https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/10558/dog-1440.jpg 3x,
    https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/10558/dog-1920.jpg 4x
  "
  alt="shiny black dog looking pensive"
  width="480"
  height="360"
/>

We saw how we can use img element and srcset attribtue to list a set of image files and have the browser decide which file to download and display considering the pixel density of the screen. What if instead we wanted the browser to consider the width of the viewport and to choose a file based on the size of the screen as well as the density.

Here with srcset, instead of saying 1x, 2x, 3x, etc. we write 480w, 960w, and this tells the browser how wide each file is, 480w meaning 480 pixel wide. With this, browser will automatically choose which image to display based on combination of device density and viewport width.

sizes: sizes attribute is used to list which size image to use at which media query.

srcset: Allows us to specify multiple files to be used based on either viewport width or image pixel width.

Goal with sizes and srcset is to give the browser information about which image file to download in the HTML.

What if we want to do more than swapping a low res file for high res file based on viewport width? What if we want to display different image on small screen and another image on big screen?

Maybe we want image to be tall and narrow on mobile, whereas short and wide on desktop or even use a completely different photo altogether.

We wrap the <img> element in <picture> element and then we have the <source> attribute where we define the source i.e. which image to load on width of viewport. We can use srcset with source element and we tell the browser which image to load based on the width or pixel. On servers, you don’t have to store and crop and deliver images of so many different formats.

Basically user uploads one images and there are workers or other services do all the work of creating image files of different resolutions.

Two elements related to images are <figure> and <figcaption> this provides the browser more semantic information about the content of the page. We wrap figcaptio inside figure, and figure contains img and figcaption. This provides the browser about this content, more context than if we’d only use a paragraph element for text below image. Search engines and AI will now know that these 2 piece of content have relationship.

6. Media

Images aren’t the only media we put on a site, audio and video files are supported too by HTML. We can use the <audio> element to place audio files on a webpage. HTML is simple and can create the browser to create an interface and play audio for us. Structure of audio element is similar to img element. <audio> element has both opening and closing tag. src attribute is used to provide the url to the file. A simple <audio src="sample.mp3"></audio> doesn’t do much, we have to tell the browser that we want the browser to provide some controls such as play button, timeline and a volume control.

Using the controls that are built into the browser is optional, and we can make our own controls as well using JS and the HTML media element API.

<audio controls src="sample.mp3"></audio>

audio element is a good example of power of HTML to provide a bunch of functionality that maybe we just don’t want to bother build ourselves, and use what browser provides. Other attributes that we can use with audio are: loop, autoplay. Reason we have opening and closing tag in audio is because at times we might use src element to specify more than one audio file much like we could with the picture element.

Maybe we want to use a new file format that’s not supported in every browser so in the process you provide a fallback to some another file for older browsers.

<audio controls loop autoplay>
  <source src="birds.ogg" type="audio/ogg; codec=opus" />
  <source src="birds.mp3" type="audio/mpeg; codec=mpeg" />
  <!-- Out of the 2 above, the browser will use the file that it understands first. -->
</audio>

MP3 is supported in most modern browsers today, OGG is another file format that had some advantages but never became popular

Films, videos and teaching have all been transformed due to the ability of web to transmit video. We use the <video> element just like audio and we use src attribute to point to a video file and we add the controls attribute to tell the browser to create a video player for us. Say we have 720p x 480p resolution file, i.e. 720p wide and 480p tall, compressed using h.264 codec and delivered as an MP4 file.

H.264 codec has the widest support across browsers, much like chosing between JPEG and PNG. There are a bunch of different codecs in which a video file might be encoded. Video files contain a lot of data and can get incredibly big when they aren’t compressed, far too big to be sent and presented in an efficient manner, so it’s safe to say any internet video is using a pretty hefty mechanism when it comes to delivery.

There have been many attempts to make the one fits all size codec some of the notable examples being Real Video, Sorenson, Windows Media, FLV, H.263. From about 2015 to 2020, H.264 codec is the one that has dominated and been used widely, but the thing is H.264 isn’t open source, it’s patented, it’s owned by a consortium that charges fees for every device, every OS, every browser, every camera anything that wants to be able to record, compress or play H.264 files and they are about to charge way more for H.265 files.

None of the image file formats that we use are owned by someone who’s charging licensing fees, they’re all public and anyone can use JPEG or GIF, none of the underlying technology HTML, CSS isn’t patented, why should video codecs be different? The answer to that is, a lot of effort has gone into creating a truly open, not patented but still super awesome video code. Folks had hoped WebM would emerge as the winner but it’s still unclear if it will.

AV1 is another codec that is looking like it might be better than H.264 and this is truly royalty free. Video element just like audio has the ability that allows us to point to more than one codec at the same time.

<video controls>
  <source src="birds.webm" type="video/webm" />
  <source src="birds.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
  <!-- Out of the 2 above, the browser will use the file that it understands first. -->
</video>

We have img srcset but there’s nothing in HTML that will allow us to send different sizes of video under different network conditions. It’s due to the fact that we do not want device only one moment to make a choice between say receiving 1080p or 360p at times initially internet is slow but speed increases and then it is better to send vidoe of better resolution. The options for video formats are: 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, 2k, 4k

This is how YouTube, Hulu, HBO, Netflix, Vimeo and other TV apps work by switching constantly from one resolution to another as people watch using a technique called adaptive bitrate streaming. This entire thing is pretty complicated and basically it needs a server farm of transcoding robots which is why when you go to put video on a website it is likely you might not use video element, there’s a good chance you will use embed code from a video hosting service which we will talk about later on.

We can put audio and video on the websites, but not everyone can hear or understand the audio. Some people are completely deaf, other people can hear sometimes but not all of it sometimes due to certain conditions, say construction noise around them etc. On web we have the ability to provide the content in multiple ways simultanously, adding captionas allows us to make our videos more accessible to everyone. To do this we will use the track element and point to a text file. The video player will provide all the functionality so a viewer can turn captioning on and off, or switch from one set of subtitles to another.

There are many file formats for captions, but on the web we want to use webvtt, web video text tracks. It’s a plain text file with a vtt extension that uses a certain convention for providing the information. We put <track> element inside the video element just like the sources element, it’s part of the list of options for the browser to use while rendering the video player.

On the track element we use the src attribute to point to the file itself. We will use kind attribute to tell the browser that it is captions and label attribute we will set English, so that in the player English is shown as option to select this caption, srclang attribute and default to tell browser this is the track that we want loaded when user turns on captions.

<video controls>
  <source src="birds.webm" type="video/webm" />
  <source src="birds.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
  <track src="birds.vtt" kind="captions" label="english" srclang="en" default />
</video>

There are a few options available for the kind attribute, we could create a vtt file that has the scripted information about what’s happening visually in the video and use <kind="descriptions">, this makes the video more accessible to the visually impaired people. kind="chapters" gives users a way to jump from one section to another in the video by listing the chapters in video.

It is possible and more likely that you will be using a video hosting service and embed the video that the hosting service provides onto your webpage using embedding.

Embedding: Placing content from one site into the body of a page on another site. There’s all kinds of content that we might want to embed onto a page. We can embed a map from Google or Mapbox, a code demo from CodePen or Glitch, slide deck from Speaker Deck or Notist. It is common to embed something complex from a service that takes care of all the hard parts for you. You get the html from the service you are using and you just have to insert it in your html using iframe element. iframe has attributes such as width, height, frameborder, allowfullscreen, allow etc.

iframes though powerful, but there are some security considerations to be had about pulling in code from other sites like this. So if you are using a CMS that someone else set up, say your job is to post content on WordPress websites or Drupal websites, then there is a good chance that you can’t just paste some random embed code form another website into your system. There’s a good chance that the CMS is set up with a different way to allow a URL or a shortcode from a specifically white-labeled source. And you might have to talk to someone who knows how to use your CMS to find out how to embed things like YouTube videos.

If you are the one building the site, then you probably need to think about how the security will work when it comes to iframe element. If a group of people will be entering content into a system, you can’t allow all iframes without some sort of verification.

7. More Ways to Identify Content

The web by its nature is global, we as humans speak 100s of different languages, there are several tools in HTML which we want to use to make sure it’s clear in which language our content is in to the browser and search engines. This can help your sites to be listed properly, the right dictionaries will show up for spell checkers, when content is read aloud by a browser, it’s more likely that the words will get pronounced incorrectly. So to avoid that we want computers to know in which language the content is in.

lang attribute with html element is used to do this. We set the language on the outermost element, if our whole page is in the same language. We might have to do it only once, say in a template file, that gets propagated to the entire site.

lang attribute is an universal attribute, i.e. we can put it on any element. We should also specify in which direction our content flows when being read, most languages in the world flow from left to right, but some flow from right to left. Specify the direction using dir attribute. It’s an universal attribute that can go on any element. If all the content i.e. lang and dir is same on your page, define it only once on the outer HTML element.

Be sure to set your charset for the project, it defines the alphabet or set of characters for the script language. Original digital charsets were very limited and only supported the latin alphabet i.e. ASCII an encoding standard limited to 128 characters, focused on the needs of certain European languages. These days most of the projects use unicode specifically UTF-8, it is an universal encoding standard for characters encompassing many languages.

When unicode started in 1991, it had defiend 7000 characters, now it has over 137,000 characters in an attempt to support every language, script, including Braille, sign writing, musical notation and almost 3,000 emojis. To specify the charset you are using to the browser, we simply write <meta charset="UTF-8">.

When the web was first invented, it made way too many assumptions about the languages and scripts people are using, and it only supported a few. Decades of work has gone into making sure that everyone is included equally. By defining the lang, dir and charset for your project you can ensure that the future of the web far more inclusive.

What about a scenario when you need an element and there isn’t one for your particular situation? Sometimes we just need a way to wrap a group of elements or to mark a phrase so that we can combine them and apply certain css hover effect on them, or we just need to target a part of DOM with CSS or JS.

When none of the other elements make sense, that’s when you should think of using div and span elements. Don’t just use divs and spans for everything, a lot of users will have weird issues in terms of accessibility, use the proper HTML element for the task at hand.

That said, sometimes we do just need a generic element. <div> is a block level element. <span> is an inline element. They both do the same thing, i.e. nothing, until you point CSS or JS at them.

<article lang="en-IN">
  <h1>This is the headline</h1>
  <div class="box">
    <!-- div being a block level element, takes in all the paragraph elements -->
    <p>The first paragraph.</p>
    <p>Some text in second paragraph.</p>
    <p>Third paragraph.</p>
    <p>Fourth paragraph.</p>
  </div>
</article>

Div and span can take all the global attributes such as class, id, lang and aria roles. Div and span are handy, but don’t let that be an excuse to write bad html.

8. Putting it all together

HTML files are the key building block of the web. Anytime anyone wants to go to a website, they start by opening up some kind of web browser or web view, and going to a URL, maybe they type the URL into the address bar, maybe they started with a search or clicked on a link, maybe they openend an app which triggered an implicit action of opening a certain url. However it happens, if there is a URL involved a web server responds to the request by sending the specific HTML file that lives at that address.

In 90s when web was new, everything needed to display was put inside one HTML file, that’s not what is used now, it’s gotten a lot more complicated now. Text frequently is stored in a database or multiple static files often pull together in the last millisecond, custom for each user. Visual styling is in CSS files, logic in the js files and so on.

What a user actually sees once the page is loaded these days is usually assembled from a mishmash of different files. No matter how the website is engineered the web itself works this same every time. The HTML file that’s returned in response to a request for a webpage is really important, it acts as headquarters for everything else that happens after the first moment of the site loading.

When browser receives the file from server, it immediately starts reading it from top to bottom and starts to do (display) what it says. At the top in <head> element there is a list of files to be imported, these can be css files, javascript files etc. and browser immediately requests for them at specified urls, and once browser has these files then it continues to do actions specified in those imported files as well.

The structure of HTML file, the key parts that every html page should have are as follows:

  1. doctype Declaration: This statement declares which era HTML file is from. By doing so we tell the browser that this webpage sticks to modern web practices and render this as such.

  2. Opening and closing html tags, typically looks like <!doctype html> ... </html>

  3. Language, direction of the webpage using lang and dir attributes.

  4. Head and body. Head is about all the metadata, all the information that the browser needs to know, though this head section part won’t be displayed on the page. Body contains the information and content that will be displayed on the page.

What goes inside head? Information about the website that you want the browser to know goes inside the head element. We use meta element for this info to be delivered to the browser. Use meta elements only inside the head, to convey metadata about the page. We use charset attribtue to define character set. <title> contains the title that will be shown on the tab for the name of the web page, if you don’t define it then it will just be address of the page.

The <meta> element can be used to define all kinds of settings. One incredibly common use is to tell the browser that the layout has been morphed to fit small screens, that it is a responsive website. Without the meta tag which goes as following:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

Without the line above browser assumes that the page is using an older technique for layout, that it’s a desktop layout that needs to be shrunk down to be shown on small screen devices. We should also add a description for the website, this will be shown in search engine results. Meta tag is used to give the page a name when it is saved to home screen and to specify tile image and a background color.

Ever copied a link to slack, discord or some other place and you see that link turn into a great little card, that’s set up using meta tags. There are many techniques which make use of meta tag to refine the experience of your site.

Another important element we use a lot inside the head element is link element. This is used to link to a range of other assets that we want to load like CSS files, fonts and favicons.

rel attribute tells the browser what kind of asset it is, stylesheet, script etc.

href attribute provides the url of the asset. Following are examples of links to a CSS file (stylesheet).

<link href="main.css" rel="stylesheet" />
<link rel="icon" href="favicon.ico" />
<!-- link to preload font file -->
<link
  rel="preload"
  href="myFont.woff2"
  as="font"
  type="font/woff2"
  crossorigin="anonymous"
/>

script: This element goes into the head and tells the browser location of a js file that we want to load. Usually people also put the js files at the end of their webpages so that the browser loads the html files at the end once everything else is loaded.

<script src="js_file.js"></script>

HTML head is a place to get everything connected and make sure that other assets are loaded and to provide data about the page to the browsers as well as search engines.

What goes on inside the body, now that we have gone over head in depth? There are 6 major elements here to learn about: main, header, footer, article, section and aside.

main: Wraps around main content of the page. Only used once per webpage, and tells the browser this is where the main content is.

header and footer: Used to mark the places on the webpage where the content is header and footer. head is part of HTML document that’s never displayed, don’t confuse header with head.

header is used to wrap site headers, article headers, headers in the content. Most webpages have a header at the top, with logo, site-avigation, site-name etc. Many webpages end with a footer at the bottom, with lists of links, some copyright information, ToS etc.

article wrapped around any instance of an article. It might be a long written article or blog post, or it might be a very short snip, a teaser card can be marked up as an article element, a tweet or social media post embedded as well can be an article. Article element just means that hey, this thing here, by iteself this is a unit of content, consider this as something that stands on its own as a useful or usable thing.

section: This is used to wrap around sections of content. If we have a long essay for instance and it is broken up into chunks with sub headlines, then we can use the section element to mark each segment. Or we may have zones on our website, a section towards the top, that’s about one topic and another section further down that’s about something else. Section is a flexible element that means, that vaguely just says okay let’s just start with another thing. Usually each section has its own headline, marking the start of a new segment of content.

aside: This is for marking something that’s off to the side. Something in a side bar, or any content that’s kind of not the main attraction. Say an inset panel that goes with a big article that gives additional info but isn’t quite part of the flow of the article itself, or ads, and are best marked as an aside.

main element is used once per page to wrap around the main content on that page. The header, footer, article, section and aside elements are the five sectioning element in HTML.

9. Forms and Interactive Elements

Form fields have been an integral part of the web for decades. Forms on the web are how we get things done. We log into sites through forms, we buy through forms, request a search, upload profile pictures, add content to a site etc. These interactions all occur through form elements, or they should happen through semantic form elements and not through divs and spans.

We tap into the power that’s built into browser, by using HTML forms, and saves us a lot of wasted effort when it comes to trying to recreate in custom JavaScript, what’s already there in the browser. We ensure that our forms work on every device and for every possible combination of input and output hardware, including devices we have never heard of.

<form action="success.html" method="get">
  <label for="name">Name</label>
  <input type="text" id="name" name="name" required placeholder="Your Name"></input>
  <label for="email">Email</label>
  <input type="email" id="email" name="email" required placeholder="email_id@domain.com"></input>
  <button type="submit">Sign Up</button>
</form>

We use get method here, not safe for practical website, it’s just a demo, keep that in mind. We have an action and method attribute here. Never use get on a real website. The name attribtue in input tells the backend what name of data to look out for. for and id attribute of label and input element allows us to connect the form’s label with input box to make it more accessible. type attribute in the name tells the browser what to expect, say email, or text or anything else, and gives us client side validation for free.

We use type attribute in button to tell the browser that our button is a Submit button and on clicking that, action defined in opening of form should be executed. We can also add required attribute in input to tell the browser that this field cannot be blank. To pre-populate a formfield with a sample of input data, we can use the placeholder attribute and put a sample or suggestion of what a field expects. User shouldn’t erase what’s in the field, use placeholder attribtue not value attribute as you’d have to erase before entering data in the input field if you use value attribute. Value attribute is good if you want to pre-populate a form with what you think is the right answer for the user, but gives user to change it too if they want. If it’s right user needn’t do anything and they just proceed to other input fields in the form.

Other options for collecting different kinds of data include telephone number, search query, password etc.

<form action="success.html" method="get">

  <!-- Name -->
  <label for="name">Name</label>
  <input type="text" id="name" name="name" required placeholder="Your Name"></input>

  <!-- Email -->
  <label for="email">Email</label>
  <input type="email" id="email" name="email" required placeholder="email_id@domain.com"></input>

  <!-- Password -->
  <label for="pass">Password</label>
  <input type="password" id="pass" name="pass" required placeholder="Enter password"></input>

  <!-- Search -->
  <label for="search">Search</label>
  <input type="search" id="search" name="search" required placeholder="Search Query"></input>

  <!-- Phone -->
  <label for="phone">Phone</label>
  <input type="tel" id="phone" name="phone" required placeholder="Contact"></input>

  <!-- Textarea -->
  <label for="textarea">Text Area</label>
  <input type="textarea" id="textarea" name="textarea" cols="30" rows="15"></input>

  <!-- Date -->
  <label for="date">Date</label>
  <input type="date" id="date" name="date"></input>

  <!-- Color -->
  <label for="color">Color</label>
  <input type="color" id="color" name="color"></input>

  <!-- File -->
  <label for="file">File</label>
  <input type="file" id="file" name="file" accept="image/*" multiple></input>

  <!-- Submit -->
  <button type="submit">Sign Up</button>

</form>

10. Structuring Tabular Data

Whole point of semantic HTMl is to tell computers everywhere what a particular thing is, and use proper HTML elements for that thing. Long time ago, we didn’t have CSS (yeah it’s that long ago) at that time laying out our content on a web page had not been invented yet. So during this time people did all kind of messy things to try and create styling and layout. Devs used to typeset headlines in Photoshop, export it as an image, so people looking at the web page saw it as something beautiful and typed just like webmaster wanted. Problem was, it wasn’t actually an headline, it was a picture of a headline. Without any tools to layout the content, people used to take the content, break it up into a lot of little pieces, and jam all those pieces into the cells of an HTML table, and just pretended everything was okay and good to ship.

It was a horrible hack, though it looked okay or even good at times but the semantics were terrible. Content wasn’t accessible, wasn’t reusable and hard to find to say the least. There is still one place, where people use this technique, HTML email. It is hard to do, and creates a terrible experience for many users but it’s really all we have in the world of email, atleast for now.

What should we be using HTML tables for? Well duhh, tabular data! A chart of data from a research project, election results, product comparisons, population data, schedules. If using the table makes the comparison easy and makes understanding of the content easier, then use the table in HTML to semantically mark it up.

To create an HTML table, we use several different elements in just the right combination. <table>, <tr>, <th> and <td>.

Conclusion

HTML is an important part of the web and full stack development. If you use the right HTML element for the right job, you start from a place of great strength. Making your project understandable to voice interfaces, search engines, social media, harnessing the power that’s built into modern browsers for a variety of devices and users.

There’s so much more to HTML, we have just touched the basics here. Language continues to evolve slowly. There are many great resources for finding more about HTML, and quickly looking something up. MDN Web Docs is one such place to find authorative reference documentation.

The canonical source of truth about any web technology is the specification, the web standard document from which that technology came. The web and all of its parts as we know, HTML, URL, HTTP, CSS, JS each of these technologies exist because a group of people collaborated on a plan for that technology. Representatives from all the browser maker organizations plus many others connect and work together in groups to discuss and debate what each language could or should do. Their decisions are written up in official documents called specifications and these specifications are closely followed as directions when browser engineers go to add a new feature to their browser.

This process is what people mean when they talk about web standards. The way the browsers do something, is standardized in an official document, to keep it uniform across every browser. The HTML specification that was most recently numbered is version 5 i.e. HTML5 and came out in 2014. There have been some talks about dropping the numbers and sticking to HTML5 and calling it as the living standard.

HTML Specification - Developer’s Edition

Web Content Accessibility (WCAG) Guidelines

HTML doesn’t changes very often, so knowing what you have seen here, will set you up for a long time.