Basic HTML and CSS

« Return to All the Concepts

Table of contents
  1. Basic HTML and CSS
  2. Introduction
  3. Editing HTML
    1. HTML Tags
    2. Headers
    3. Text (Paragraph)
    4. Div
    5. Fragments
    6. List
    7. Images
  4. Editing CSS
    1. Add Border and Padding
    2. Make Text Red
    3. CSS Rules
  5. Bootstrap
    1. Making a Button
    2. Two Column Layout
  6. 📝 Task - HTML and CSS

Introduction

Okay, so let’s actually mess with our web application.

We’re always going to start with our base Component, which is named App. The examples you see here are all meant to model what you will do in your actual App.tsx file’s App component. We’ll learn way more about Components in a later chapter. For now, just focus on the HTML and CSS we’re putting into our page.

Editing HTML

Make some tweaks to the HTML content of the page. View the changes in the browser.

HTML Tags

In general, all HTML tags are written with angle brackets (<h1>). You gotta have a start tag and an end tag (<h1> and </h1>) surrounding the content. Tags can be nested inside of other tags.

Headers

Let’s start with a basic tag, the first-level header h1.

By the way, anytime you see a chunk of code in this book with a pencil button to the right, you can click the pencil to edit and run the code right here on the page!

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <h1>This is header text</h1>;
}

There’s also h2, h3, and so on.

Text (Paragraph) 

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <p>This is just a paragraph of text. It can go onto multiple lines, if you want.</p>;
}

Div

What if we want both header and text? We need to group them together under one parent. That parent shouldn’t be visible. This is the purpose of the div (short for “division”, as in “to group together”) tag.

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <div>
        <h1>Hello World</h1>
        <p>How are you doing today?</p>
    </div>;
}

Fragments

A weird thing we can do in JSX is to have tagless chunks of code using empty angle brackets.

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    // Won't need to use this very much
    return <>
        <h1>Hello World</h1>
        <p>How are you doing today?</p>
    </>;
}

We won’t do this too often, but I wanted to show it off. It’s useful when you REALLY don’t want to have to have a div.

List

There are two kinds of lists, unordered (ul) with bullets and ordered (ol) with numbers. They each have list items (li).

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <div>
        Unordered List:
        <ul>
            <li>First thing</li>
            <li>Another thing</li>
            <li>A third item</li>
        </ul>
        Ordered List:
        <ol>
            <li>First thing</li>
            <li>Another thing</li>
            <li>A third item</li>
        </ol>
    </div>;
}

Images

Embedding an image (img) tag requires us to specify an attribute. These are name="value" pairs inside of the start tag.

The two attributes relevant for an img tag are the src (the URL of the source image to display) and the alt (alternative text to display if the image fails to load for some reason).

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <div>
        <h1>Hello World</h1>
        <img src="../assets/images/pet-ada.jpg" alt="A picture of my dog Ada" />
    </div>;
}

If you look closely, this tag doesn’t have an end tag (there’s no </img>). Instead, it’s just a “self-closing” tag (<img/>).

The URL we used in the example above works for this textbook, but you may have to setup your URL very differently.

  • One approach is to cheat and use a direct hyperlink. This is a risky strategy, because you are now at the mercy of whatever external service is hosting the image. What if they make the image private, take down the image, or, even worse, change the image later? For a professional site, you do not want to take such risks.
  • Another approach is to place the image in the public folder of your application, which allows you to link to the image after it is built. There is advice out there on how to do so. This has drawbacks too, since the public folder is meant to exist somewhat outside of the compilation of your website. If there is a mistake with your path, the error messages you get will be less helpful.
  • Our favored approach is to place the image in your src folder (perhaps further within an assets or images subfolder) and then import the image using code, which is explained in this guide. This surfaces errors more easily. You may find this more difficult to get started with, since it requires a bit more code, but long-term this is how we usually recommend you include images. You can learn more about this approach in this page.

Editing CSS

There are two ways to change the style of a elements. You can use the style attribute or edit the rules in the App.css file. Let’s run through some quick examples.

Add Border and Padding 

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <div style={ {border: '1px solid blue', padding: '4px'} }>
        this will be surrounded by a border and padding.
    </div>
}

Make Text Red

Create a span (as in “text that spans some region of space”), and then give it a color field in its tag.

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <div>
        This is <span style={ {color: 'red'} }>colored text</span>.
    </div>
}

CSS Rules

Open the src/App.css file and look for the .App-header rule. Any element that has a className that includes App-header will have all of these style rules applied. You can change the background-color there from a hexadecimal color (e.g., #282c34) to something else.

There are tons of HTML color strings out there. Or you can learn how to specify colors in hexadecimal. Go wild.

Bootstrap

We’re going to use the Bootstrap library quite a lot. This is a really convenient library.

Making a Button

Let’s make a simple Bootstrap Button.

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <div>
        <Button>Click Me</Button>
    </div>
}

You will need to add an import statement at the top of your file (something like import {Button} from 'react-bootstrap';). This should be easy to do in Visual Studio Code: hover over the red squiggles under the word <Button, click Quick Fix, and then choose the appropriate import.

The button does not do anything, which is sad. We’ll give you some code so that something happens when you click the button.

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <div>
        <Button onClick={ () => { console.log("I am logged") } }>Click Me</Button>
    </div>;
}

Now clicking the button will log "I am logged" to the console. Yay!

Two Column Layout

Organize the page into at least two columns of layout. You need to have a Container tag with a Row tag inside, and then you can have any number of Col tags.

export function App(): JSX.Element {
    return <div>
        <Container>
            <Row>
                <Col>First column.</Col>
                <Col>
                    Second column.
                    You can put whatever you want in here, and it will be on the right side.
                    Maybe try adding an image?
                </Col>
            </Row>
        </Container>
    </div>;
}

Bootstrap layouts are pretty sophisticated, you can do a lot: https://react-bootstrap.github.io/layout/grid/

📝 Task - HTML and CSS

Our next task is to edit the HTML and CSS of our application. We have prepared a bunch of new tests to give you helpful milestones.

$> git pull upstream main
$> git fetch upstream task-html-css
$> git checkout -b solved-html-css
$> git merge upstream/task-html-css

Run:

$> npm run test:cov

Since we are now failing these tests, we need to fix them. Refer to the information in the page above to tackle each test in turn:

  • Add a header
  • Add an image with alt text
  • Add a list with at least three elements
  • Change the background color of the header area
  • Add a bootstrap button with the text Log Hello World
  • Make the button log Hello World! when clicked
  • Put a red-filled rectangle in each column using a div tag with width, height, and backgroundColor styles.

To earn full points, you must pass all the tests.

Once you are done, add and commit all your changes for the branch. Then, you will need to push your local branch to the remote repository. We will no longer remind you about this command to push a new branch after this page!

$> git push --set-upstream origin solved-html-css

Anyway, next you need to make a Pull Request back to your main branch on the GitHub repository. Make sure your tests pass and the site deploys, before you submit to GradeScope!

Once you’re done, we’ll start learning more about TypeScript »

Back to top

Created by Austin Cory Bart, Josh Lyon, Kurt Hammen, Emma Adelmann, Terry Harvey.