The world of software and web design is dominated by coding languages, of which there are countless! Each coding language works entirely differently, requiring those wanting to use them to spend countless hours of dedicated study before they can be competent writing code in the language. Two of the most common coding languages are HTML and CSS. These are commonly used as starting languages due to their relative ease to learn. But what’s the difference? Let’s take a look:

HTML is an initialism that stands for HyperText Markup Language and is used in order to create websites by designing the actual web pages that exist within them. In fact, it is considered to be one of the easiest languages to learn and code for as it is supported by pretty much every single browser you can think of. HTML coding can be completed through software packages like Adobe Dreamweaver, which allow you to focus on building to visual elements of the web page while the coding is automatically filled in for you.

CSS, on the other hand, is an extension of HTML that describes the look of a webpage in terms of layout, colour, fonts and much more. This initialism stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is relatively easy to maintain once you get to grips with the basics.

In order to understand how they are different, it’s important to think of HTML and CSS as two separate languages, but also recognise that one is an extension of the other. This means that the way that code is written for HTML cannot be applied in the same way as CSS, and vice versa, however; CSS can be linked to pre-written HTML code in order to describe a relationship between the two. 

Many of the early websites were void of design and style, which is why CSS is such a useful tool in modern web development. However, a developer should always ensure that they understand both concepts separately before trying to combine them together. A great way to understand the difference is to compare the process of building a website to the process of building a house; if HTML is the foundations and structural skeleton of the building, then CSS is the décor, furnishings, and exterior aesthetic that gives it market appeal. HTML and CSS are two of the easiest languages to start coding with, so if you’re interested in learning about web development, these are a great place to start!

These aren't the only web languages, so look out for our future articles on PHP, MySQL and Javascript.