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Website Technologies

HTML​

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.

html files are text files that contain html source code. These text files end in .html and contain plain text that must match the html syntax defined here.

HTML uses a concept of tags. Here's an example of a Heading (<h1>) tag and a Paragraph (<p>) tag:

<h1>This is a Heading</h1>
<p>And this is a paragraph</p>

If you were to copy and paste that text into a file named whatever-you-want.html and then open that file in your favorite browser, you will see a heading and a paragraph.

Here's a tutorial to learn about HTML: https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp

CSS​

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets

css files are text files that contain css source code. These text files end in .css and contain text that must match the css syntax defined here

CSS is used to control what the html should look like. For example, we could change the colors and size the HTML above using the following css. In this example, we set the background color of the Heading to red, and we change the font size of the paragraph to 20px:

h1 {
    background-color: red;
}

p {
    font-size: 20px; 
}

Here's a tutorial to learn about CSS: https://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

Markdown​

HTML and CSS are great, but it can be a bit tedious to write guides like this using html and css. Mark down is another document format that makes it easier to write content for websites.

Markdown files are text files that end in .md. Markdown files contain text that must match the css syntax described here

For example, we can represent the same HTML above using markdown:

# This is a Heading

And this is a paragraph

Markdown files are then converted to html, which can then be understood by a web browser.

Javascript​

So far, all the technologies we have discussed are simple ways to describe static content. When you need to make things come alive, you need more power :-)

Javascript is a full programming language. This means that you can use javascript to write just about any program that you can dream up. Other popular programming languages include: Java, C#, Go, Python, Php, and lots of others.

Web browsers can run "client side" javascript. This means that they can't quite take advantage of the full power of javascript, but they can run a lot of it.

Node.js is another javascript runtime environemnt. Node.js can run all of javascript completely unrestricted. We often call this "server side" javascript.

As you can imagine, if we allowed Web Browsers to run any program, it would be very difficult to stop hackers from running viruses on everyone's computers. That's why they are limited as to what pieces of javascript they're allowed to run.

See our team's guide here on how to setup your computer to run javascript.

Version Control​

Version Control is a strategy to allow multiple people to collaborate and edit the same files and track changes to files over time. Here's an overview about Version Control

Git​

Git is a version control system. Here's a tutorial about Git