What to Learn After Learning Basics of HTML

What to Learn After Learning Basics of HTML

In this series, we have covered the basics of HTML and in this final episode, I want to go through some questions that you might have.

Why Did We Just Covered the Basics? What About Other Elements and Attributes?

There are a lot of HTML elements (100+ elements) but you don't use them all in a single project. For that, you can waste your time on HTML alone and learn all the elements and the attributes or you can start a project and once you get to a point that you need a new element, you can learn how to use that.

Let's say I want to add a color picker to the contact-us.htmlfile. First thing I would do is to search for "HTML form color picker". Most of the time, two of the websites that will show as the first results are mozilla.org and w3schools.com. Click on the W3Schools link.

By reading the text and the examples, I know that I need to add an <input> tag with the type attribute set to color.

Inside the contact-us.html page, after the "Detail" text area block, add the following code:

<br>
<div>
  <label for="color">Color:</label>
  <input type="color">
</div>

Save the file and check the result.

1.color-input.jpg

So we needed a new element, and we have found it by a simple google search.

The page also states that "The default value is #000000 (black). The value must be in seven-character hexadecimal notation." meaning that we need to provide the color in hexadecimal format. So I can set the value to #FF0000 which is the hexadecimal format for the red color and that will change the default color selected.

<input type="color" value="#FF0000">
2.color-input-value.jpg

What to Learn After HTML?

It depends on what do you want to become as a developer. Do you want to become a front-end developer to build the parts of the application that interacts with the user or you want to become a back-end developer to build the parts of the application that deals with the back-end logic and server? You need to first make your mind on this point and then decide what to learn after HTML.

What to Learn After HTML if I Want to Become a Front-End Developer?

HTML is just the structure of a webpage and in order to make the page look nice and give it some styles, we need to apply CSS to it. So the next step is to learn CSS and that will give you the skills that you need to design beautiful websites. You can take a look at https://roadmap.sh/ website to get a better idea.

What to Learn After HTML if I Want to Become a Back-End Developer?

It won't hurt if you learn a little bit of CSS so that you get a general idea of how CSS works but you can also skip CSS and move to a language that you need to learn depending on the project that you want to build. Again, I would suggest that you take a look at https://roadmap.sh/ which is a useful resource for you to choose your next step.