A website is rendered in a web browser through the HTTP Protocol. There’s a lot more one should learn about Internet Protocols, but it’s not required to get an operational understanding of working with websites.

Web Design Principles

The page that is rendered by the web browser is formatted in Hypertext Markup Language or HTML for short. HTML is a set of nested tags that describe how the page should be structured. It’s like an outline with hierarchical layers or if you recall from data structures class, a tree. This tree is officially called the Document Object Model (DOM).

If we use cake decorating as an analogy, HTML is the structure (i.e. the layers of cake), and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the styling on top of the layers. You can be barebones or go all out with CSS to obscure the underlying layers.