Understanding HTML and CSS: Modern Web Fundamentals

The only course that teaches you to read the specs & stay relevant. Semantic HTML, responsive CSS, flexbox, grid + more.

Major Updates! New AI-powered assignment exercises for accessible, semantic HTML have been released, along with new lectures on maximizing the quality of AI LLM output when AI generating HTML and CSS!

New lectures on hyper-modern CSS including Container Queries (@container), :has, Nesting, Media Query Range Syntax, and Layers (@layer). Deeply understand how these latest additions to CSS really work, and keep your skills on the cutting edge!

Updates include a brand-new modern real-world HTML and CSS project using cutting-edge CSS techniques and hands-on coding exercises!

In this course, with a combination of theory, practice, and projects, you'll gain a deep understanding of HTML and CSS (HTML5, CSS3 and beyond), as we dive into how these technologies really work. We'll look at the problems HTML and CSS are trying to solve and how they solve them. We'll dive into how browser rendering engines really work. We'll gain confidence to read and understand the HTML and CSS specifications, so you can continue to teach yourself in the future and keep your skills fresh.

Along the way we’ll follow our core philosophy of “Don’t Imitate, Understand”. Simply copying others’ projects won’t help you when faced with a real-world job that doesn’t look like the projects you’ve copied. To succeed in a real world job, you need to truly understand.

This course is designed for beginners to learn from scratch, but also to break experienced developers out of bad habits.

Some things you will learn in this course are:

• Learn to author semantic HTML.

• Learn how semantic HTML improves the accessibility of your user interface.

• Learn to read and understand the HTML and CSS specifications, so you can continue to teach yourself as new HTML and CSS features come along in the future.

• Understand how browser rendering engines work, under the hood.

• Gain a deep understanding of the browser DOM.

• Gain a proper understanding of the CSS cascade, inheritance, and specificity.

• Learn why CSS works the way it does, so that your mental model let's you deal with problems as they come up during work.

• Understand advanced CSS features such as Flexbox and Grid.

• Learn to use CSS to create mobile-first responsive design.

• Hands-on coding exercises and quizzes to test your skills.

• Understand how hyper-modern CSS features like Container Queries (@container), :has, Nesting, Media Query Range Syntax, and Layers (@layer) work, keeping your skills modern and on the cutting edge.

• Modern CSS projects with hands-on coding exercises to practice authoring semantic, SEO-friendly, and accessible HTML and using the latest in modern CSS.

• Learn how to prompt an AI to give you the best quality HTML and CSS.

If you are new to HTML and CSS: you will learn fundamentals and skills that will help you the rest of your career.

If you are an experienced developer: you will learn to reset your mental models, understand and rely on the official specifications, and dramatically improve your day-to-day development experience.