Web Fundamentals

Learn how the web actually works — from the ground up. Most web development courses teach you to copy and paste. This book teaches you to understand. Web Fundamentals walks you through the three technologies that power every website ever built — HTML, the DOM, and CSS — not as a list of tricks, but as a coherent system with real logic behind it. You'll start where the web starts: with markup languages. What they are, where they came from, and how HTML relates to XML, Markdown, SVG, and the rest of the family. From there you'll build a complete mental model of how a browser takes a text file and turns it into a living, interactive page. What's inside: The full history and theory of markup languages — and how HTML compares to its peers HTML from first principles: document structure, semantic elements, forms, and HTML5 The Document Object Model — how browsers represent pages in memory, and how JavaScript reads and rewrites them in real time CSS from syntax and selectors through the cascade, specificity, the box model, Flexbox, Grid, typography, color, responsive design, custom properties, and animation How browsers actually work: the rendering pipeline, layout thrashing, compositing, and the 16ms performance budget Modern production patterns: BEM, CSS architecture, design tokens, container queries, :has(), and more Who this is for: Beginners taking their first steps into web development. Self-taught developers who want to fill in the gaps. Anyone who has been writing HTML and CSS for years and wants to finally understand why it works the way it does. No frameworks. No build tools. No prerequisites beyond curiosity.