HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Markup means tags that go around content like text, pictures, videos, to “mark up” or describe what they are.

HTML tags look like this: <p>This is a paragraph.</p>. They typically surround a piece of content, like a block of text, and describe it as such. In this case, the <p> tag describes the content as a paragraph.

Examples of HTML tags include <mark>, <section>, <header>, and <button>.

Nesting is like Russian dolls - or tupperware - a box in a box in a box. We nest tags inside each other. That’s how we write HTML. For example:

<article>
  <header>
    <h1>Title</h1>
  </header>
</article>

Here the <header> tag is nested inside the <article> tag, and the <h1> tag is inside the <header> tag.

Not all tags are nested, in this example:

<article>
  <header>
    <h1>Title</h1>
  </header>
  <p>Some content</p>
</article>

Both the <header> and <p> tags are nested inside the <article> tag, but the <header> and <p> tags are not nested inside each other - they are siblings.

Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Lynx, JAWS, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera…

It produces what we see - it produces a visual representation of the document. But in a little more detail: the browser parses the HTML we write, executes the linked Javascript, loads the CSS, media, and other resources, and produces a model of our document, called the document object model. It produces an API called the DOM.

It uses all of this information to decide what to show us.

Make sense of. Analyse syntactically.

The rules that structure language, so it can be understood by someone else. I put words in an order, according to rules, I structure meaning and you can get that meaning back out if you know the same rules. Programming languages are the same - they each have a set of rules, they each have a syntax.

Think about HTML and CSS. They use different syntaxes.

For instance, when grouping together the information about an HTML tag, you may write: <h1 class="main-title">This is a title</h1> - there are several pieces of syntax here, and one is that the tag is opened by <h1> and its contents are done when you see </h1>.

In CSS, on the other hand, you may have a rule like h1 { color: red; } - we group together declarations applying to the selector between {}s.

HTML and CSS use different syntaxes, even though some of the concepts are similar.

API stands for Application Programming Interface.

Imagine you want to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow. You may have an app in your phone which can tell the weather, but it doesn’t know the weather everywhere - it will ask some service on the internet.

That service on the internet is an API. The service on the internet can be asked specific questions. Maybe it can be asked “What will the temperature be tomorrow in London?” or “Tell me the next week’s temperatures for every city in the UK?” or “When will it next rain in Glasgow?”.

And when you ask a question, you need to know how to interpret the answer. If you ask “When will it next rain in Glasgow”, and get back an answer of “5”, what does that mean? In 5 minutes? In 5 hours? It’s been raining for the last 5 days?

The service may have a lot of knowledge, but it can only be asked specific questions. And the app on your phone needs to know how to interact with it. “What can I ask/tell the API?”, “How do I ask/tell it those things?”, and “How should I interpret the answers I get back?” are all good things to think about when thinking about an API.

The DOM is an API. From our code, we can tell it things (like “All h1 tags should be blue”), and it will take action as a result. One of the ways we can interact with the DOM API is by giving it a CSS file - it will apply the CSS file when it’s working out how to display a page. The CSS specification helps us understand how we can interact with the API - what we can tell it, and how we tell it those things.

Semantics means meaning. Semantic HTML is meaningful code: each piece of data marked up with correct, that is to say, descriptive tags. A heading has an h1 tag. A button has a button tag. There are only two html tags that deliberately have no meaning (div and span).

These tags are then interpreted by APIs to give functionality to the page. A button tag is interpreted by the browser as a button, and so it can be clicked, or triggered in many ways. A heading tag is interpreted by the browser as a heading, and so provides a traversible page outline to a screen reader.

HTML tags are powerful because they are meaningful. They are meaningful because they are semantic. Semantic HTML is powerful HTML.

HTML tags are powerful because they are meaningful. They are meaningful because they are semantic. Semantic HTML is powerful HTML.

The better structured your document, the more meaning you can pack into it, the more powerful your code is, the better it will work in more contexts, and more things will be able to interface with it. The more meaning you put in, the more meaning other readers can get out.

Cascading Style Sheets are a language of style - a visualisation of the DOM - using selectors, properties, and values in rulesets.

A ruleset is made up of a selector and a declaration. A declaration is made up of at least one property and value pair. This is the syntax of CSS.

selector {
  property: value;
}

Selectors look like this: p { background: red }. The selector is the p in this case. This p selects all elements of the DOM tree called p and sets a rule about how to show them. Selectors always come first in a ruleset.

A property is a quality, a characteristic. A value is the amount.

For a person, you might say their ‘age’ property has the value of 40. For an element, you might set the width property to the value of 100%.

You learn them by using them. You look it up here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference. And the other thing you can do is look at the autocomplete in Devtools.

via GIPHY

A cascade is a stream or sequence of a things where each thing affects the next. You might imagine pouring champagne into a tower of glasses. The champagne flows into the top container; it then cascades into the next container; etc. In CSS we’re actually pouring from many bottles into one tower.

So in CSS ’the cascade’ means the order or sequence of the rules as they flow into the DOM tree according to CSS precedence.

It means hierarchy. One hierarchy in CSS is inheritance: children inherit from parents. If a parent node has red text, all its children will inherit that red text color. But when another rule comes after, and overrules, it takes precedence. Everything in CSS is determined by order.

Order is so important in CSS because CSS is a declarative programming language that programs the layout of boxes.

CSS renders the nodes in our DOM tree as nested boxes, and we program their appearance using fonts, colours, and spacing.

It means, broadly speaking, that the entire code is processed and then applied, from top to bottom in one go. You don’t write for loops or if/else statements; there are no functions as such; you just declare the outcome.

In CSS you do the ‘what’, and the browser does the ‘how’.

Specificity is a weighting system for CSS rules. The more specific your selector, the more power it has. For example: IDs can only ever mean one node. IDs are unique, so they are more specific than classes, which could mean many nodes.

Classes added to html element are more specific than just a plain element selector, as a class of p is more specific than just all p. If you get two elements with the same specificity then the one that comes last in the order wins.

The browser sorts all your rulesets, or declarations, into a defined order according to the power, or weight, of the declaration and applies the result, like a game of cards where higher value cards beat lower value cards.

Stronger rules override weaker rules. Everything is sorted and sorted until eventually a final value wins out and the view is rendered. The browser sorts like this:

1. Match the media
2. Sort by origin
3. Sort by specificity
4. Sort by document order

Order means ‘what comes first?’.

Another way to think of ‘earlier and later’ is ‘farther and nearer’. The closer the declaration is to the node in the DOM, the ‘later’ it is in the CSS. So an inline style overrides a style set in a style block, which overrides a stylesheet linked in the head, which overrides any stylesheet linked higher up in the head, which all ultimately overrides the user agent style that comes in the browser.

Identify clearly. Name explicitly.

Render means to hand over, actually - to give back. In the browser, it means to show the result of all these computations we have talked about. It turns the code into pixels and paints them on your screen. So it’s the end result - the final face.