Sometimes the basics get lost in the quest to get going quickly, start designing, start looking good. Teachers and learners sometimes lose track of the fact that the foundation holding up every act of communication on a web page is HTML.
The basic fact in terms of foundational HTML mastery is just this: HTML elements are based on semantic logic. HTML elements communicate meta information about what certain parts of a page do semantically. HTML tells you that certain bits of text are headings or paragraphs, or lists, or blockquotes, or links, or subscripts, or tables. That semantic information is the essence of a successful communication. Get the HTML right, and your page communicates successfully with everyone in every circumstance.
Before looking good even enters the imagination of a designer, the knowledge needs to be there about the semantic building blocks of every web page, and that, my friends, is plain old basic HTML.
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