📕 I: Why Make Websites?

some woud have you believe that the web is a complicated mess of junk not worth bothering to learn.

some will tell you that you aren’t a “real” programmer if you develop for the web.

this isn’t a complete beginner’s tutorial for making hypertext and hypermedia sites. we won’t explain loops, variables.

here’s what we say.

The web is ubiquitous

Web browsers are some of the most popular applications globally.

The beauty of the web is that it doesn’t matter if someone has a desktop computer, a laptop, an iPhone, an Android, or a tablet. All of them have a way to access the web.

The web is not a walled garden

One of the reasons the web is fantastic is that it is permissionless. There isn’t a company that owns “the web”, where you need a “web developer account” to post your website. You just… post your website. You can even host it from your home (given the right security measures).

You can share your work, photography, journals, or whatever else for literally anyone else in the world to see with a few simple text files and the click of a few buttons. How amazing is that?

The web is fun

Here’s some ASCII art you’re reading on the web.

 _____________
< hello there >
 -------------
   \\
    \\  ^ ^
       (ovo)
       (|||)
        v v

Here’s a picture of a random cat sent through the web.

Or entire games, or maps of the world, or personal websites.

The web is wild, wacky, and fun!

The web is more than just pages

Although this book is focused largely on building websites through our browsers, the web is much more than that.

We can download the 14-day weather forecast with a single script in our terminal.

Or get a database of the most popular movies.

Fetching and interacting with the web is not just limited to your browser window!

The web is free

You do not need a fancy computer or specialized technology to start playing around with the web.

The goal of this book and further chapters is to inspire you to learn and get excited by the web as a platforms.

What’s next?

The next chapters of the book will introduce hypertext, hypermedia, and start teaching your about websites while not ignoring the primitives.

What not to expect: a book which will guarantee you a job.

We understand that making a living is important, and there are plenty of courses out there suited to learning popular frameworks and technologies for this purpose.

We are focused on intentional (and hopefully fun) web development with an emphasis on the foundations.