Day 1: Introduction to Web Development and HTML

Web development is the profession of building websites. In other words, it’s a type of software development that uses the web and its technologies. When we talk about the web, we must also discuss the Internet, which is the backbone of the web. Read more about it in the first section.

Before we discuss HTML, it's important to understand what the web and the Internet are. As a web developer, your understanding of web and Internet technologies is paramount.

The Internet is a global computer network with protocols for global information exchange. Read more about it here.

The web, on the other hand, is a service that uses the Internet network to share and distribute information in a special format called a web document. Web documents are encoded using a special language called HTML. This is why you are taught HTML coding when you start learning web development.

The web employs additional rules beyond HTML to achieve its function. The Internet already has a protocol called IP, which allows us to pinpoint a specific machine on the Internet. The web uses this protocol to uniquely identify every web document with what is called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
Another concept defined by the web is links between documents. This linking of documents led to the concept of a "web of documents" because hyperlinks connect billions of documents, creating a vast network of connections.

All these rules are encapsulated in a protocol called HTTP that governs how the exchange of web documents should occur. HTTP is an important concept that you must understand well as a web developer.

Returning to our role as web developers, it means we need to understand web technologies extensively—how they work and how to use them to build the software we want. For this reason, in this section, we will start by learning HTML. See you in the next chapter, where we will explore the basic elements of HTML.