How Much HTML and CSS Should You Know To Develop?

As a content creator, I began using Blogger, composing about financial entrepreneurship and education. With Blogger, in those days, there were not a lot of leeways you could have in terms of customizing a site's look. I began tinkering and found tutorials that taught me the way to tweak the CSS documents of a Blogger theme. This was when I realized I had to understand HTML and CSS. I didn't start learning until finally accepting the truth that editing several CSS lines could never give me complete control of how a website I was making would look and function.

Now more than five years later, I already know how to make a website from scratch and also put basic functionalities inside. Heck, I can now even code either the front and backend of a fundamental blog app and even build a TV-Series app with ReactJS. However relatively advanced my abilities are now, I can not deny the fact that learning HTML and CSS is my own foundation.

I know the itch to start with a real programming language like Ruby, JavaScript or even Python. However, to build something completely, at least to the web, a developer should have adequate HTML and CSS skills. But a web developer does not need to be an expert in them.

Do You Need That Much HTML/CSS To Be A Developer?

I initially thought of making a full blown list of all the HTML Development tags and CSS Development  selectors/properties. Then I realized I could just lead the reader to more useful resources. I’ll then just make high-level suggestions in order to emphasize that web developers need not have a Bruce Lee-level of competence to be HTML/CSS ninjas. To build a site you only need to use common HTML tags such as for headings (h1-h6), links (<a>), images(<img>), unordered lists (<ul> with <li> inside), divs and spans. In addition to these are the HTML5 semantic tags <header>, <nav>, <main>, <section>, <aside>, <article> and <footer>. There are lots of other tags that are required in certain situations but I only included those that are commonly utilized. For CSS, you just need to learn how to style text (font properties), links (text-decoration mostly), tweak dimension and position of elements (width, margin, padding, float, position) and style backgrounds (background-image and background-color). CSS transitions and animations are also nowadays ubiquitous in most sites, so it may be necessary to learn them.