HTML5 and CSS3: What Are They?

When so much of today’s media emphasises the significance of visual appeal in web design, it is understandable that the developmental tools and programming languages that structure these websites are a vital skill to possess. Coding institutes, having advanced themselves enormously in the past few years as viable alternatives to the traditional educational model of pursuing a degree in an ICT field, understand the value that HTML5 and CSS3 possess in order to elegantly construct the websites of tomorrow, and if you’re curious as to why, continue reading.

While there are seemingly endless programming languages with which coders these days use in the modern arena of software engineering and technological developments, coders, programmers and designers wouldn’t be anywhere if they didn’t understand just how significantly HTML has influenced the digital environment. It is so much more than just the scaffolding supporting the entire framework.

Now, before this article descends into what seems like an alien language of terminology, let me assure you, this is a surface-level discussion, and the finer points of these technologies are much more complicated than could possibly be contained in a handful of sentences, jargon, and definitions.
-A brief history of HTML4.0-

The previous version of HTML, HTML4.0, was first published in 1997, and was one of the most competitive markup languages for over 15 years. An eternity in tech time.
As of 2012, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) acknowledged that HTML5 was becoming, and will continue to endure as, a dominant technology underpinning the web development arena for the indefinite future. HTML can be imagined as the building blocks with which websites are designed and structured, and HTML5, the most refined and modern version of the technology, can be imagined as the most intelligent architecture a coder can avail of.
HTML5 has essentially put its hands up above its predecessors, as well as other competitive markup languages, by adopting the strain of a digital environment that is far more demanding with the richness of content, more interactive between the browser and the end-user, and cleaner and more concise with code that has to facilitate increasingly dynamic content.

Many software engineers and practising members of the ICT sector would agree that HTML5 is the future of website design. Technology, particularly in the digital sphere, is an ever-evolving animal, and HTML5, particularly when used in tandem with software such as CSS3, are the technologies tasked not just with understanding the beast, but taming it.
While the vast majority of programmers imagine HTML as the default, CSS, more often than not, can be used as an enhancement, as opposed to a substitute. They work symbiotically to provide interactive, content-rich, dynamic interfaces. CSS, ( or Cascading Style Sheets to the curious layman) is a web-based markup language that deeply influences the aesthetic look and formatting of a website to the browser. It defines the look and feel of the website. It shares the philosophy of the efficient, engaging portrayal of content with HTML, which is why they work so well together.
A web browser can read HTML files and compose them into visible or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses them to interpret the content of the page. HTML describes the structure of a website semantically along with cues for presentation, making it a markup language, as opposed to a programming language.
We so often view the world as if it’s the size of a computer screen, and when the entire world is online these days, that particular side-effect of technology is understandable.

Our world so often shrinks down to the size of a browser screen, so it has never been more important for coders, programmers and designers to acknowledge the role that HTML5, as well as CSS3, will play in the future of intelligent website design. If you have any interest in developing the skill-set of a capable coder and designer, the Code Institute offers a detailed, interactive learning experience covering all the intimate details of coding and website design.