In today’s digital world, the internet plays an important role in our daily lives, whether we are using it to search for answers or to communicate for work, school, or personal reasons. However, have you ever taken a moment to think how the websites we use on a day to day basis are actually built?
The world wide web was built by a British scientist named Tim Burners-Lee back in 1989. Websites are actually pretty simple, nthat is if you are able to understand the concepts behind it that make it what it is. Every website you visit is built on a language known as “HTML,” but what exactly does that mean? HTML stands for “hypertext markup language” and its the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. HTML helps defines the content and structure of web content. First came HTML and then came everything else: CSS and javascript. The only things that a web browser is able to understand is HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheets,” which control how a page looks and “feels,” or in other words it controls how the headings, font size, and colors of a page all look. CSS has grown to be able to includes things such as transitions, allowing CSS to move into Javascripts territory, because Javascript is in fact not secured. The main purpose behind the introduction of CSS was to allow us to style things on a webpage.
Moving onto Javascript, which is a programming language that allows for users to create interactive webpages, is the inter activity that allows you to hover over a specific image or icon that will redirect you to another page in order to get you where you need to go. It’s also used to add functionality to web pages, such as allowing content to update in real time.
These three concepts all work together to allow websites to work and help us with our day to day needs. From e-commerce sites, to browsing social media, HTML is esentially the backbone of the internet and taking the time to truly understand it, can allow you to unlock the development of the word wide web from 1989 to now, 2025.