Welcome to intro webdev! Today we're going to get our computers set up for web development, cover basic file management and text editing, and make a Hello World project.
Websites are the universal way we access the internet. Google, Wikipedia, and most social media are websites!
What they have in common is something called HTML. HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language" - it's just a set of rules for how a website should be displayed. When you visit a website, a remote server takes an appropriate HTML file and sends it to your browser. Browsers know how to read HTML, so they can display the formatted contents instead of just showing you lines of computer code.
Luckily for us, HTML is human-readable - humans and computers can both understand it, and you don't need fancy tools to write it. Because all websites are just HTML files, and HTML is human-readable, we can create a website as easily as creating a new file!
If you aren't familiar with how to do that, don't worry - we'll cover it in class. You can also ask your favorite search engine.
Make sure your file is named exactly "index.html". Some operating systems will name it "index.html.txt", and this is wrong - your browser won't read it properly. It's okay if you create a text file at first - ".txt" files are human-readable too, so you won't need to do anything special to change it to "index.html". You may need to enable "show file extensions" to view and change it. Get in the habit of being precise about filenames!
Once you've got an "index.html" file created, you can write some actual HTML! Open it in your favorite text editor - Notepad will work fine. Don't open it in a word processor; word processor files are not human-readable so word processors can't edit HTML.
Paste the following into Notepad and save. We'll go over what this does later.
<!DOCTYPE html> <h1>Hello, World!</h1>
Finally, open index.html in your web browser - right clicking it in File Explorer, selecting "open with...", and clicking your web browser should work fine. You'll see something like this:
Hello, World!
If it works, nicely done - that's your first website!