In a world where technology invaded all fields, including agriculture, having a website for your company or even a tiny project is considered to be highly important. Therefore, web design is a very needed "skill" in order to properly set up a decent website that is user-friendly. On the other hand, it is not rocket science at all! Fortunately that is, with the existence of two powerful, and modern languages: HTML and CSS. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, while CSS means Cascading Style Sheets. Now that you know what HTML stands for, you will clearly, by now, acknowledge the fact that HTML has the role of "pillars", if I may say so, because it makes the task to structure pages easier for web designers. The latter, CSS, may be slightly hard to understand, but it is pretty much self-explanatory. "Cascading" is a process that signifies, contextually, that the style sheet with the highest priority will control the display of content. Style sheets are basically files that contain declarations to make certain pages look the way the designer/client wants.
However, perfecting these languages is a bigger task than learning it, due to the fact that experience also plays a major role in web design, because, an experienced web designer has in possession many ways and techniques or general rules that he follows during his work. Techniques, such as - notably - how to center a web page, totally depends on each designer; but they all share one thing, the "wrapper div"! Additional to experience, a solid web designer is regularly up-to-date with the newest features etcetera, including new tags, new properties... Nevertheless, it's not impossible to perfect these languages, nor is it late! Any individual at any age has the mental ability to grasp the aspects of HTML and CSS. It is proven that the more your environment is adapted to a certain language, the faster you'll learn it. Well, that is true! Since we do live in a world of technology, it's definitely easier to learn a computer language than a "spoken" language. How exciting is that?
Let's dive into the history of these two emphatic languages, shall we? It all began roughly seven years ago, with HTML evolving from a simple language, relying on simple tags, to a more complex mark-up system, allowing people to create animated pages with images, and sound. It has evolved from being HTML+, to HTML 2, HTML 3.2, HTML 4 to reach today's HTML 5. The history of HTML, particularly is related to an English computer scientist named Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, also known as the World Wide Web. It all started when he wondered about a way to link scientists together by putting research documents in one place, meaning, a way to jump from a document to another by pressing a single button. He then developed a hypertext program called "ENQUIRE". Years later, domains came to life, a then-way to name computers. The Sir, afterwards, invented HTML, that was based on another language named SGML. On 1996, Hakon Lie and Bas Baros thought about a way to separate content from the style applied to it, such as the font, colors etc... With the approval of the W3C (World Wide Web consortium), CSS 1 was released, enabling people to use font properties, backgrounds and especially margins and paddings. CSS 2, CSS 2.1, and 3 then were approved, adding more properties to optimise the code better.
