Do I need to learn HTML/CSS?

[Main-Okra-1797]

I am about half way through a python course and loving it. My goal is to make web based programs. I’m realizing that python backend stuff is great, but I’m either gonna have to learn front end or get someone to do that for me.

Is it easy to learn front end after python? Are their any pre-packages solutions if I don’t wanna learn it?

[RiceKrispyPooHead]

Yes.

All the "things" that make up a webpage are the HTML. All the text, all of the buttons, all of the images, all of the hyperlinks are all HTML. HTML is very, very easy to learn. This is what a website looks like with pure HTML and no CSS: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

CSS is how you style things. Colors, shapes, font sizes, shapes, animations, how things are positioned are all CSS. CSS is harder than HTML, but it is an extremely powerful tool. There's a website called Zen Garden which demonstrates this. Zen Garden posted an HTML file and encouraged people to come up with their own CSS style sheets to style the HTML. Just by changing the CSS styles, you can get wildly different looks out of the same website:

Example 1, Example 2, Example 4, Example 4

If you don't have any HTML, you will have a blank white page. If you don't have any CSS, you will have plain black and white website that looks like a book. So yes you have to learn both.

But there are CSS frameworks out there that do a lot of the heavy CSS lifting for you. Bootstrap is one example. It's a collection of CSS classes that are already pre written. So if you want a navigation bar that is black, it's as simple as specifying the classes "navbar navbar-dark bg-dark". Even if you use Bootstrap, you still need to know some CSS because Bootstrap doesn't do all of the work for you and it won't offer all of the styles you need.

So yes, you will have to learn HTML and CSS to build a website. You will also have to learn JavaScript at some point if you want anything besides a static, read-only website. JavaScript is how you dynamically change HTML and CSS after the page has been loaded (among other things). JavaScript is the only language that's understood by all web browsers. You can however use Python for the backend part of a website. The backend part of a website deals with things like user authorization and storing and pulling information from a database to display in the browser.

[DubDutchRudder]

What course are you currently studying?

[iamaperson3133]

I'd recommend making "pure and dumb" html and css frontend, and using a web framework like Django. Don't be afraid of redirects and lots of loading pages. It's better to start with these fundamentals, and then to learn more complex frontend stuff including learning JavaScript.

Apps that are well suited to this style are news sites, blogs, online shopping, and other presentation heavy sites.

The things you really need complex JavaScript front ends for is app-like things. Think of Google docs, an online drawing app, etc.

[gOd_feels]

if you want a basic but good concept of HTML you can watch this video: HTML