Web Development Core Concepts - What is a Web Page?


Hello and welcome to web technology core concepts at Learning Journal. You learned that a website is a collection of related web pages. So, if you want to create a website for yourself, you must create web pages and link them together. Right?
Web pages are the building blocks of the website. So, in this video, we will try to understand a little more about web pages.
Here is the definition.

A web page is a document that is suitable for the web browsers.

Make sense. Let's try to understand it.
We can create documents in a variety of formats. It might be as simple as a plain text document, or it might be a rich document decorated with headings, paragraphs, and images. You can save these documents in a variety of file formats, for example, a word document or a PDF document. Your web browser can display some of those formats and may not be able to display many of them.
For example, your browser can open and display a PDF file, but if you have the same content in an MS Word document, your browser will not be able to open it. Most of the beginners might believe that if the web browser can open a document, it implies that the document is a web page. But that’s not correct.
Try to open a PDF file in a browser. Your browser opens it without any error. Do you think that the PDF file is a web page? The answer is a simple No. A PDF document is not a web page.
Then what type of document is a web page?
A web page is a document that we write using HTML language. The HTML is a language that is specifically designed to create a web page.

Modern Websites

A modern web page contains three main components.

  1. HTML content
  2. Style information
  3. Scripts

Let`s try to understand the purpose of all these three things with an example.

Purpose of HTML

Let’s first look at the HTML and its purpose. When you create a document in MS Word, you type some content. The content is nothing but a plain text that covers the topic or the subject. Right? However, most of us will try to format the content using headings, subheadings, paragraphs, bold, italicized, etc. This basic formatting gives a structure to the document. Without the basic structure, it may be difficult for a reader to understand the text properly.
We use HTML to give a basic structure to the web page content. I mean, all of those basic formatting things can be done using HTML language. So, if you are creating a webpage, you will use HTML for defining your main content and give it a basic structure.

Purpose of CSS

Once you define your main content in an appropriate structure, you might want to make it more attractive or effective for the readers. You can do that by applying some advanced styling to your content.
You might want to apply a specific font type, size, and color for your headings. You might also want to align your text in a specific side. You might want to add an image to the background of some text. All such things are advance styling information.
The HTML language does not support advanced styling because the purpose of HTML is to give a proper structure to the document. For applying an advance style to the text, we use another language that is known as CSS. The CSS stands for cascading style sheets.

Purpose of JavaScript

The HTML and the CSS is more than enough to make an attractive and effective web page content that appeals to a reader. However, modern websites also contain a lot of interactive content. For example, you might have seen a moving text and button on our website’s homepage. There are few other interactive things like the scrolling cards.
If you want to add such interactive features to your website, you need to use some scripting language that your browser can understand. JavaScript is one of the most widely used scripting languages. So you can use JavaScript to create interactive content on your website.
Great! That’s it for this video. See you again with a new concept.
Thank you for watching Learning Journal. Keep learning and keep growing.


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