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084 Do I Really Need To Study HTML and CSS As A C# Web Developer? · DevQuestions with Tim Corey

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Do I really need to study HTML and CSS as a C sharp web developer?
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's the question that comes up every once in a while.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I really wanted to take a whole episode to devote to this question.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about this in today's episode of DevQutions.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna give you the answer right front.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, you do.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about why that's important.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: But first, let's talk about some of the statements I've heard from web developers.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: One, uh HTML and CSS are just easy.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't need to spend any time in them because they're just simple.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: There's layout tools.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you're missing a lot there, but okay, sure, let's keep going.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't use HTML and CSS.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: I use Angular, React, or Vue, or Bootstrap, or jQuery, or Blazor, whatever the fill in the blank here is.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't use HTML and CSS.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: I use one of those tools instead.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: No, you use HTML and CSS, but let's keep going.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Or another excuse I hear is I learned HTML and CSS a long time ago.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: I don't need to learn them again.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: They're basically the same, right?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Nope, they've changed a lot, but let's talk about that in a little bit.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: And lastly, I just want to learn ASP.NET Core.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just here to learn the web part of it, the web part of C sharp.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, but you still need to run HTML and CSS, right?
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about these because there's a lot of confusion about really what is HTML CSS, how much has it changed recently?
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  SPEAKER_01: Is it important to learn as a web developer?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: And just how much time should I spend on it?
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, the web runs on HTML and CSS.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's pretty much what it runs on entirely.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you may say, well, what about JavaScript?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Or what about yes, but JavaScript essentially just powers or changes and tweaks the HTML and CSS.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: HTML is the layout CSS is the the way to make it look pretty, essentially.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so that is, or HTML is a structure, let's put it that way.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Structure and and and pretty.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: But those are the things that get modified is the HTML and CSS.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: The JavaScript makes those changes, it creates new HTML and CSS to put in the page.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's what ASP.net core does, is it creates HTML and CSS to put in the page.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: So when you're building things, you are building HTML and CSS.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now you may have some abstractions on top of that that make it um easier for you to do, but you still have to build HTML and CSS.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: So the web is powered by this.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: You should really understand it well if you're gonna be a web developer.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Number two, the standards are continually changing.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is not something where we designed HTML and then just kind of stopped or stopped for the major stuff.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Or CSS.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe just say, okay, here's how you style an element and then we're done.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: Nope.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: That stuff is continually changing.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, there are things that are right now changing about CSS3 because CSS3 is actually a bunch of modules instead of one uh large thing.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's a bunch of smaller modules that are more uh changing independently.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: So some things have been ratified recently, some things have been put into release candidate recently, and so what's happening in CSS3 is a bunch of change, and that change affects how you build web pages.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: So you need to keep up on this.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: So as the standard changes, you should learn that standard.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the the tough part is that if you just learn based upon old resources, that's when you get into trouble because they were based upon previous standards that are no longer considered the best practice because they were workarounds for not having what we have now with modern HTML5 and CSS3.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I built my uh web development course because I wanted you to have modern web development tools in your hands because there's so much old stuff out there.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now, number three, browsers are continually changing.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: They continue to make improvements, they continue to change how they do things, what they support, what they don't support.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: For instance, if you go to caniuse.com, you can find out all the new features that are in HTM5 and CSS3 or coming out, and which browsers support them already.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's going to change over time, and you can find out oh, this new feature is now available in these latest browsers.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: On the other end of that, browsers are being dropped off of support.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was doing web development for a company um back a job ago, I was having to support Internet Explorer six through eight, and that was an awful pain.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we got the opportunity to go to just nine and above, and then finally 11 and above.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, right now, Microsoft does not support Internet Explorer, it doesn't support it, it only supports Edge.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: And now the new Edge from Microsoft is what's called an evergreen browser, meaning it continually updates itself and keeps it on the latest version unless you block that.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, some companies do, and you have to understand how that works and what those changes are, what you can can't support.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Some companies are gonna have to support old browsers, but that list is going to change.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: When they do, you need to know how to handle getting rid of the old code that's slowing you down and making it harder to do things in order to get to a more modern standard that's more efficient.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: So browsers are changing both on the new side as well as the old side.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, number four, this is really important.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's one that if you are a fully abled person, you might skip over.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Please don't.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: Accessibility aids are continually improving.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: The idea that you have to have full sight and full hearing and be able to use a mouse and keyboard, and the list goes on of the things you have to be able to do in order to interact with the web, that's not really a great situation.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, we want to be able to present the web to people who cannot see well or at all.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: We want to be able to present the web to people who do not have the ability to use a mouse.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: We want to present the web to people who cannot hear, and so on.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so we need to be able to use these tools to make our websites more accessible to more people.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so those accessibility tools and aids are improving, but we have to stay on top of that so we improve our sites along with those tools.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then number five, search engines continue to change what they look for, they continue to evolve what they're looking for.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be that you just put a whole bunch of keywords on your meta tag and that was good enough.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the search engines just basically trusted you.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now they don't, which is probably a good thing because you don't just get spam search results.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: But it does mean that if you want your website or your web application to be discoverable on the web, you need to do a few things.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, even the fact that you have to have SSL on your site, even a website that has nothing that technically needs to be secured.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: The search engines are going to deprioritize you, move you down a list if you don't have SSL enabled on your site.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_01: Things like that are important to know and important to evolve with the times.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Finally, screen sizes continue to change.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: And this is one you're gonna say, well, yeah, but we have phones, we have tablets, we have desktops.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: What's the real difference?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how about ultra wide screens?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: I have one of those.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: I actually had a um a customer that that messaged me and said, Hey, just so you know, your website doesn't work so well on an ultra widescreen.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now, uh, right now, as of recording this video, my website doesn't work well on a whole lot of screens because it's a the limitation of the tool.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: But we're working on changing that, and one of the things we're gonna be looking at is how do you make sure this looks good even on an ultra widescreen?
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because some people will be consuming those resources on that screen, and we want to be able to provide a good service even to those people, not just the people that are on a standard we call a standard desktop size 1920 by 1080, maybe, because there's people on the ultra-wide screen, there's people on their phone.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Your website should be able to translate between all of those in a way that works for all those platforms, and that's gonna come through HTML and CSS.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of reasons why you need to keep up on the latest HTML and CSS.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: Don't just look at it as I learned it once and then I just use it for the rest of my life that way.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: You need to continue to grow in this.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: This is why I say that you don't want to invest in a ton of languages because there's no language where you learn it and then you stop learning.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: You have to continue to invest in to keep it up.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're learning C sharp and you want a web developer, you have to keep up on C sharp, HTML, CSS, and probably JavaScript as well.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: So those four things, four languages you need to keep up on in order to continue to excel in your field, to continue to grow in your field.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: So, bottom line, as a web developer, if you haven't spent a significant amount of time focusing on modern HTML CSS recently, including the new layout options like Grid and Flex, the new accessibility options, the new browser development tool options, the new social media formatting and more, then you probably need to upgrade your skills.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't want you to stagnate where you're at.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: I want you to continue to grow because that's how you're going to continue to produce high-quality resources instead of stagnating and becoming irrelevant.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of DevQuesti.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining us for this episode of DevQuestions.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you would like to help make more content like this possible, please like, subscribe, rate, and share Dev Questions.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: You can also send your questions to questions at IamTimCorey.com.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to imtimcore.com and enroll in the course.