In honor of Codecademy’s 11th anniversary, we’re looking back at the 2000s websites and software that influenced our founders to build Codecademy — and inspired a generation to learn to code.

Here, Codecademy Co-Founder & CEO Zach Sims reminisces on the formative years he spent building websites in the 2000s that ultimately led to the idea for Codecademy. Explore other fun deep dives into early aughts internet topics here.

When I was 13, I started a review site and e-commerce store for iPod cases. It has since been scrubbed from the internet, but at one point it was bringing in thousands of visitors and north of four figures in revenue. I was even approached by a major brand in the category to consult — though they rightfully lost confidence in me after my voice cracked on one of our phone calls, revealing my inexperience.

But it was 2003, and it didn’t matter if I was 13, 33, or 93. It seemed as if anyone could build something on the web and make an impact.

While my iPod website never went on to change the world, I realized then that the future of tech could be built by those who took the initiative to learn how to speak the language of the internet — both literally and figuratively. In the past couple of decades, those who spent their formative years on the internet of the 2000s have gone on to co-architect the digital world we live in today — as engineers, product managers, UX designers, and founders, just to name a few. Our world is far more global and digital than the one we were born into; and for us millennials who cut our teeth on the 2000s-era internet and have gone onto work in tech, our careers have been shaped by it.

Like many people, my earliest memories of the internet can be traced back to AOL and AIM. The ability to instantly write and communicate with my friends — let alone anyone in the world — felt invigorating. But this tech also influenced social norms; with these platforms came new modes of communication. Fortunately for many millennials, interacting with the internet became second nature; and soon enough, we were customizing Myspace and Xanga pages, creating mixed CDs with Napster and Limewire, and connecting with strangers over shared interests on Reddit forums.

My personal outlet was building websites, which included a few blogs and personal pages. As teens of the 2000s, the internet was a playground for building, connecting with others, and expressing ourselves creatively.

Of course, there were really two modes of communication that we were learning during this time: how to communicate with each other on the internet and how to communicate with the technology itself to make that end user experience possible. The empowerment I found was in the latter.

Learning the actual programming languages could unlock a level of interaction with the internet that felt almost magical. Suddenly, you had the power to design a website that was 100% unique to you; you could create a better version of an existing application; or you could even bring to life a totally new idea. What was clear to me then — and still rings true now — is that learning programming languages grants you entry into a whole new world of opportunities, both personally and professionally.

Many of us who grew up playing with the internet are the same people who make up the digital workforce today. Our generation paved the way for a new economy, with tens of millions of us becoming developers, data scientists, and other roles that may not have been so prevalent (or even existed) a couple decades ago. The internet of our youth prepared and inspired many of us to build these careers and use the power of technology to make a positive impact on our world.

Even those who weren’t around to witness the internet taking shape in the 2000s have benefitted from the learnings of these early days and can still feel the reverberations of this time. Take one look at TikTok, or any Gen Z space on the internet, and you’ll see plenty of nods to the early aughts. Nostalgia for the 2000s is alive and well, and continues to inform the perspectives of those who will shape our future.

That’s why, in honor of Codecademy’s 11th anniversary, we’re exploring the lessons of the 2000s internet: to pay homage to the breeding ground for a generation of technologists. Be sure to follow along on our blog, as well as Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, for fascinating stories and deep dives from an era that still has so many lessons for aspiring developers today.

Looking back, it’s easy to trivialize what those AIM conversations or MySpace layouts or even my teenage experiment with e-commerce contributed to society. But the lessons from this time continue to influence what we’re building here at Codecademy, and what many of you are building in your own lives and careers. So join us this week in taking a digital walk down memory lane.

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In honor of Codecademy’s 11th anniversary, we’re looking back at the 2000s websites and software that influenced our founders to build Codecademy — and inspired a generation to learn to code. Explore other fun deep dives into early aughts internet topics here.

Perking up at the digitized sound of a door creaking open. Getting butterflies when your crush’s screen name appeared on your Buddy List. Deciphering a cryptic Away Message complete with lyrics to an emo song.

If you were extremely online in the late ‘90s through the aughts, these hallmark features of AOL Instant Messenger (a.k.a. AIM) probably bring on a surge of nostalgia. And of course they do — AIM basically defined the way many millennials communicated in their formative years. But if you look beyond the end user experience of AIM and see why it was built the way it was, you’ll learn a lot about some of the best practices the tech world still uses today.

After 25 years, the story of the enterprising coders who launched AIM can teach aspiring developers about how to build products that can connect with users on an emotional level — and maybe even shift the entire culture.

How the idea for AIM was born

Around 1994, an engineer at AOL named Barry Appelman came up with a concept that would eventually become a core feature of AIM: a list of contacts that showed you who was online in real-time. At the time, AOL wasn’t interested in developing an instant messaging platform, but a group of engineers within the company saw potential.

Fellow AOL developers Eric Bosco and Jerry Harris joined Barry and started to design and code a standalone instant messaging platform that implemented the “Buddy List.” Notably, the team did all of this without AOL’s official blessing, working on the “unsanctioned project” after hours, Eric told Mashable in 2014.

The idea of engineers going behind their employer’s back to quietly launch a cutting-edge product sounds like a typical (and, TBH, badass) tech founder story you might hear today. In the late ‘90s, however, the “web browser wars” were raging, and offering a free product with open-source software was unheard of.

AIM had the potential to flop, from both a business and cultural perspective. “Writing code is one thing; you get to put ideas you have down into a system that’s very exacting, and if you don’t get it right, it won’t work,” explains Jerry, who was a Technical Manager, System Architect, and Software Engineer at AOL from 1995 to 2005. “Exposing it to other people is a risk, because people may not like it, and they may criticize it. All of that risk is part of the thrill when you get it right, and you make a difference.”

Thankfully, AIM most certainly did not flop. From strategically making AIM free to use, to regularly incorporating user feedback for new features, the best practices that the developers employed no doubt contributed to what a generation-defining success AIM ultimately was.

Here’s what it was like to build AIM, and the lasting legacy that AIM left on the developers and tech products that came after it, according to Jerry Harris and Mark Donner, the Technical Manager for AIM. (We’ve edited the conversation in the style of an AIM conversation — but, yes, those were their real screen names.)

codecademy: Hi! Tell me about your AOL days… What was your role and how did you get hired?

jerryharri: I was hired into a startup company in Boston that was writing a web browser, called BookLink, back in 1994. Soon after I started, AOL purchased and acquired BookLink. I was a coder at first, working on a web browser in C++ for Windows and Macintosh, and then I moved into Dev Management of the team and releases.

donnermk: I was working in flight simulation and was pretty happy with my career when this funny little company called America Online headhunted me. They needed somebody who could really get teams to work together, so I came in as a Technical Manager.

donnermk: I got pretty aggressive on releasing features. They were kind of shy, but I was like, Come on, let’s go make a difference! I saw what they had, and I was amazed.

codecademy: How’d you end up working on AIM?

jerryharri: The web browser was the main thing I was working on for over a year or so, and then AOL made a deal with Microsoft, where Internet Explorer replaced our browser engine. So we really needed something else to do.

jerryharri: AOL Instant Messenger, at that time, was just called Oscar — that was the code name. It came into our lap [after Barry came up with the initial idea of a Buddy List] and we started working on it from almost day one and took it from there.

codecademy: brb

For some more context: In 1996, AOL announced an alliance with Microsoft that made Internet Explorer the built-in default web browser for AOL customers. Some saw this as a way for Microsoft to edge out its competitor Netscape, while also enabling AOL to expand its customer base. A year later in 1997, the first release of AIM was shipped.

codecademy: So what problem was AIM intended to address? Why build it?

jerryharri: Instant messaging was a feature on the AOL [Mail] client, along with Buddy List. We were starting to find a lot more people — friends and colleagues outside of AOL that were on the internet — who we wanted to chat with.

jerryharri: It was really just like, “Hey, let’s get this out there for everyone else to use, because it’s such a great feature and tool.”

codecademy: What was the initial response to AIM like within AOL?

jerryharri: Other programmers were kind of like, “Well, that’s cute or whatever, I guess. I’m working on a real thing.”

codecademy: omg lol

jerryharri: And among upper management, like the executives, there was a lot of concern that this was going to fundamentally undercut our business, because it was free.

codecademy: What was it like working on a product that so many people used?

jerryharri: It was amazing. We’d already worked on the web browser and seen how that had taken off and was redefining a lot of things in the world.

jerryharri: At first, AOL Instant Messenger was just seen as kind of cool. Then we started building more things on top of it, like shared gaming and file transfer — those things never took off. But the Away Messages, the Buddy Icon, the smileys, and everything else started giving people a lot more expression. It seemed to make a more personal difference in people’s lives than the browser did.

donnermk: I can vividly remember a time that I was visiting my in-laws and I had to work a little bit. I went to an internet cafe where you paid money per hour to use a computer. I happened to let the staff know that I’m the manager that runs AIM, and I might as well have said, “Hi, my name is Mick Jagger.”

codecademy: B-)

codecademy: As a team, how did you decide which features to add? Like the incoming message sound, or the Away Messages…

donnermk: Our ideas sprung from several places, but most of it was we listened to the audience. There were no market experts, because this was a new tool. We were a little bit rebellious. We really listened. People’s suggestions — no matter how trivial — would lead to discussions, which would lead to a core feature. We valued those that were typing on the keyboard.

jerryharri: We did weekly releases, and we had a link for people to send us feedback, which we read every week. Sometimes we would turn around changes in a week based on people’s feedback.

codecademy: Can you give an example of a feature that came directly from user feedback?

jerryharri: Some of the changes to how we reported warnings came from users communicating what was happening [on AIM]. If you got too many warnings, we actually throttled your network connection to AIM, so that your messages would go out slowly. And if you got warned by other people too many times, you got paused for some period of time.

jerryharri: It really spoke to the focus on quality, and the customer or user experience, which we were all about. AIM was not a moneymaker, so we had the benefit and luxury that it was all based on users.

codecademy: brb again

In 2017, after 20 years, AOL sunset AIM for good. The company announced it was shifting to “focus on building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products.”

codecademy: When you think about applications and tech products we use today, can you trace AIM’s impact?

donnermk: My guess is that AOL Instant Messenger was the start of just about every peer-to-peer communication tool that exists today. I think we can credit Appelman and Bosco for that.

donnermk: I don’t think people realize how big a deal it was to have your online presence always on. It changed your computer to something that you turned on and said, “Gee, I hope someone’s out there.” To something that, when you got back to your machine, people would say, “Hey, where have you been?” It changed the whole social dynamic of communication.

codecademy: Nowadays, coding is much more accessible than it was in the ‘90s, making it easier for people to build products like AIM. What are your thoughts on the future of learning to code?

jerryharri: The user experience and everything behind and supporting that is the key thing to learn. That is timeless, because the language and the technology is going to continue to change.

jerryharri: AIM is a great example, because the skills that I learned there, I’ve applied to code, applications, and products I’ve worked on over the years. The database, server, and how it’s deployed have changed — but the user experience in the data model behind it are the things that have remained steadfast.

donnermk: I think five or 10 years from now, there’ll be much more artificial intelligence, machine learning type of code construction methodologies that we probably haven’t even captured yet.

codecademy: Looking back, how did working on AIM influence your career in tech and life?

donnermk: It’s hard to see what my career would have been without it. I went on to do other things at AOL — I worked with big data on the analytics side and was lead on the backend infrastructure — but nothing was as impactful as AIM.

jerryharri: The close connection with the users really excited me the most and directed me for the next several decades of work.

jerryharri: For me, it was always about working closely with the people who actually use the stuff you’re making. It’s almost like a drug when what you’re doing gets so many people excited, and people are using it. It’s just amazing when you write code and it can have that impact on people.

codecademy: :’)

Inspired to begin your own coding journey, but not sure where to start? Take our programming personality quiz to discover the careers, programming languages, and courses that best fit your interests or aspirations. Whether you want to build the next generation-defining application or better understand the tech products that you use all the time, we have the courses and guidance to get you started.

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In honor of Codecademy’s 11th anniversary, we’re looking back at the 2000s websites and software that influenced our founders to build Codecademy — and inspired a generation to learn to code. Explore other fun deep dives into early aughts internet topics here.

ICYMI, for Codecademy’s 11th anniversary celebration we’re giving you a crash-course in the internet of the 2000s and paying tribute to the websites and software that defined a generation of technologists.

When thinking about iconic early aughts internet trends, most people’s minds go right to AIM and Myspace. And while these sites introduced groundbreaking ideas for the time, there are two other important sites that set the stage for platforms like Facebook and YouTube: HOTorNOT and Facemash.

Read on to learn how these sites worked and the rich legacy that they left on the World Wide Web. Then code your own ‘00s-era mini app called DOGorNOT (we swear it’s not as weird as it sounds) using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

A brief history of HOTorNOT and Facemash

Back in 2000, software engineers in Silicon Valley coded a website called HOTorNOT, where people could upload photos of themselves and have strangers rate their “hotness” on a scale from 1 to 10. It’s hard to imagine this shamelessly simple website getting greenlit (let alone becoming popular) today — but at the time, it was broadly considered okay. HOTorNOT’s runaway success was a pivotal moment for the internet.

Keep in mind that this was before Tinder and Facebook existed, so the idea of sharing photos and inviting a dialogue — about non-famous people’s looks nonetheless — was novel. “Everything about HOTorNOT was about wanting to cultivate the idea of a two-way web, finding ways to connect people,” co-founder James Hong told Mashable in 2020. “We really saw ourselves as trying to build the ultimate people router.”

Other programmers iterated on HOTorNOT’s premise and saw success. In 2003, a Harvard sophomore by the name of Mark Zuckerberg (ever heard of him?) hacked the school servers and coded a “prank website” called Facemash, which presented two headshots of students and invited users to vote on the more attractive photo. Facemash would go on to become Facebook.

Even the YouTube co-founders credited HOTorNOT for the idea for a video-sharing platform. “I was incredibly impressed with HOTorNOT, because it was the first time that someone had designed a website where anyone could upload content that everyone else could view,” YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim told TIME in 2006. “That was a new concept because up until that point, it was always the people who owned the website who would provide the content.”

How to code your own DOGorNOT app

If all this internet nostalgia has you in the feels, we have a fun coding project for you that involves building a HOTorNOT-esque game, DOGorNOT, using HTML/CSS and JavaScript.

The DOGorNOT mini app is tame compared to its predecessors. To play, click the photo that you believe is a dog (harder than it sounds!), and see if you guessed correctly.

Want to code your own DOGorNOT-inspired game? First, check out this workspace to peek at the code Jiwon Shin, Codecademy Senior Curriculum Developer, used to make it. Anyone with a free Codecademy login can access an IDE to experiment building apps like this in workspaces.

Here are the programming languages and coding concepts that Jiwon used to create DOGorNOT, plus links to courses that will walk you through the skills. To learn all of these techniques and understand how the languages interact, check out our course Building Interactive JavaScript Websites. (And don’t get discouraged if you don’t understand what all of this means — our courses are beginner-friendly!)

HTML organizes and displays the site’s content:

• Just basic HTML here; no complex HTML tags required

CSS gives the site its the recognizable ‘00s aesthetic:

JavaScript makes the site dynamic:

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HTML is the foundation of all web pages. It defines the structure of a page, while CSS defines its style. HTML and CSS are the beginning of everything you need to know to make your first web page! Learn both and start creating amazing websites.

In honor of Codecademy’s 11th anniversary, we’re looking back at the 2000s websites and software that influenced our founders to build Codecademy — and inspired a generation to learn to code. Explore other fun deep dives into early aughts internet topics here.

To many millennials, websites like Myspace, Xanga, and Neopets are as emblematic of their youth as Beanie Babies and The Spice Girls. Logging on after school to chat with friends on AIM, create a jealousy-inducing layout on Myspace, or feed your Neopets was how many young people in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s socialized, formed communities, and expressed themselves. Little did we know that these talents could actually serve us in today’s job market.

On TikTok, you may have heard people joke about how coding HTML/CSS as a teen counts as programming experience — but there’s some truth to this proverbial “pipeline.” Many millennials (anyone born between 1981 and 1996) went on to get jobs in tech in part because of the lasting impact that the internet and technology had on us as kids and teens.

In honor of Codecademy’s 11th anniversary this month, we’re looking back at the Y2K era tech that inspired millennials to code and led to the launch of Codecademy. So we asked a few millennial members of the Codecademy team to trace their careers back to the nostalgic and oh-so-cringey tech that shaped them into the engineers, designers, and people they are today.

Calla Feucht, Engineering Manager at Codecademy

The throwback tech I loved most: Neopets and Myspace

“My first exposure to anything like code was in the forums on Neopets. I found a thread where people were talking about showing off like their profiles where they had made them look special. And I was like, Holy cow. This is amazing. How do I do this?

Neopets actually had guides on how to customize aspects of your profile; they had this special type of markdown to make things bold, or italic, or make your text glow. I edited my profile and just mucked around in the CSS and HTML. It got to the point where I got good enough at this that I started offering my services to other players in trade for rare items. I loved the tangible factor: tweaking something and seeing the results there on the page. It was just really cool.

One of the first challenging things I took on in HTML and CSS was on Myspace. During the whole ‘scene kid’ movement, people’s Myspace pages always looked so unique. They figured out how to make a single column instead of the two columns and the font was different. I was like, I want that. It was hard and more advanced stuff than I’d ever done. Similar to Neopets, I also ended up offering my services on Xanga and Myspace for customization. I was a little businesswoman apparently.

When I rediscovered programming in college, it just clicked. Because I got started doing it at just that right age, picking it back up as a young adult felt like second nature and very innate. There was this language that I had learned years ago and just hadn’t used — like a mother tongue almost — so I just fell back into it.”

Tamar Yadin, Senior Product Designer at Codecademy

The throwback tech I loved most: Geocities

“I was always exploring the internet in the very early stages when we had to dial-up. Then I realized that I can build my own website and play around with it. I don’t remember how I got to Geocities — probably my dad helped me — but I was into adding GIFs into a site and then understanding how to move and scale them. I definitely remember all the interactiveness and being able to affect what I’m seeing on the screen and interact with buttons and dropdowns.

Stuff like that was, for some reason, always very interesting to me. Being a very visual person, I liked that I could control how stuff lived inside of the web. Then, later I realized that it’s UI and I can really be a designer.

The early stages of exploring, and touching everything, and breaking stuff to see how they work on the web, encouraged me also to be self-taught in a lot of things later on. This is super specific to me, but English is not my native language, and I learned a lot of English by building websites. So like, a divider is something that I came to realize what it is because there were a lot of different types of dividers there that I could choose from [on Geocities].

Understanding the structure of everything — that there’s a background to the page, and there’s the text, and you can control the fonts, colors, and positioning — and then being able to control it was really cool. And also, it gives you power to implement design. Finding clip art, GIFs, and images and curating them was new at the time.”

Megan McCoy, Curriculum Project Manager at Codecademy

The throwback tech I loved most: Angelfire

“I had taken QBasic* in high school and just started Pascal and C++ and I wanted to make a website. Angelfire had templates and that was fun, but I didn’t want it to look like everything else so I ‘Asked Jeeves’ how to write HTML. I am pretty sure this was before JavaScript even existed. I just wanted to make things look fun. I sent the url to all my friends and asked them to sign my guestbook.”

* QBasic is a lightweight programming language developed by Microsoft that was based on BASIC.

Nik Stern, Curriculum Developer at Codecademy

The throwback tech I loved most: Neopets

“In fifth grade, I had my Neopet pages and my shop, which I ran with my mom. We would go around the site and see other shops that looked really good. My mom was like, ‘You know computers, why don’t we have a shop that looks like this?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ There were essentially guides all over the internet that would say: If you want the sparkly GIF of the Gelert, paste this code into the shop.

I would copy and paste certain things, but then I started figuring out the mechanics of it. This does this, but if I change this value, I can have a different image, or I can make the background tiled. It really was my first experience getting to manipulate what a website looked like.

For the most part, I tried to make cute things. I wasn’t really able to do it, but I tried my best. Looking back at some of my earlier efforts, I’d probably be like, oof. But as a kid, you’re like, Oh my god, I made this thing happen. And that’s so exciting.

Then, when I was 17, my mom’s husband owned the domain name for the city that they live in, and they wanted an actual website. My mom was like, ‘You made us those cute pages on Neopets. Can you code this city website?’ My partner and I spent the summer before college trying to code this website that was so far above our skill level, given how little experience we had.

So in a very literal sense, Neopets got me my first coding job. There was some basic stuff that I still remembered from the Neopets days, although there was a 7-year gap between when I coded on Neopets versus when I did web design.”

Uno Susanto, Paid Marketing Manager at Codecademy

The throwback tech I loved most: Neopets, Myspace, and Friendster

“I joined Neopets in grade school because my friends had it. By day two or three of playing, I was hooked, literally addicted. I was obsessed with collecting certain niche items on Neopets, like this wart-themed pen that was really rare. It was a big part of my social life: I would go to school and tell my friends about a new thing I collected or a place I explored in Neopets.

I had a Friendster and Myspace — and I was all about customizing my Friendster page. I would change the little header background for my Friendster account. And you could drag and drop like certain widgets, like there was a music widget. I would play the theme song from The O.C. I don’t know why I was doing this on a weekly basis, I guess I didn’t have anything else to do.

I don’t remember if I was using HTML and CSS other than maybe changing certain color codes for buttons and fonts and stuff like that. Sometimes, if the code wouldn’t work out, I would just double-check and go through. Did I add a hyphen somewhere? Or an extra space that I wasn’t supposed to?

I didn’t even know what coding consisted of, or what it could create directly until I was in high school and I had a couple friends who were going to major in computer science in college. I just did it for fun.”

Which tech products and applications from the ‘90s and ‘00s had the most significant impact on you? Be sure to share your stories and tag Codecademy on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

HTML & CSS Courses & Tutorials | Codecademy

HTML is the foundation of all web pages. It defines the structure of a page, while CSS defines its style. HTML and CSS are the beginning of everything you need to know to make your first web page! Learn both and start creating amazing websites.

In honor of Codecademy’s 11th anniversary, we’re looking back at the 2000s websites and software that influenced our founders to build Codecademy — and inspired a generation to learn to code. Explore other fun deep dives into early aughts internet topics here.

It’s a tired argument that practically everyone who codes has heard before: Knowing HTML and CSS doesn’t count as “real” coding. They aren’t even programming languages. You can’t really do anything with just HTML/CSS.

These types of comments can feel discouraging whether you’re a professional programmer or are just starting to dabble in code. Using HTML/CSS to build websites is one of the best ways to learn how to code, which is why the languages are often recommended for beginners. So where does all this HTML/CSS shade come from?

One reason why people are quick to dismiss HTML/CSS has to do with fundamental differences between these languages and other ones. If you want to split hairs, HTML/CSS technically don’t contain traditional programming logic, so they’re not true programming languages, explains Sarai Fernandez, a Curriculum Manager in Cybersecurity at Codecademy. A programming language is a set of instructions that a programmer writes for a computer to follow and perform a task. HTML is a “markup language” and CSS is a “style sheet” — together, they determine how content is displayed on a web page. The main difference is that markup languages don’t follow logic or algorithms and instead just consist of formatting instructions for data.

As you can see, what this distinction obscures is how powerful and important HTML/CSS are for programmers: Invented in the late ‘90s, HTML/CSS built the web as we know it. Without these tools, the websites you rely on today for everything from socializing to shopping to working would be fragmented and incredibly bland.

Obviously, this conversation is way more nuanced than the technology itself. “The main issue is that this debate mostly exists to gatekeep beginner programmers or designers from being considered programmers,” says Nik Stern, Curriculum Developer at Codecademy. (More on this later.)

At Codecademy, we’re firm believers that everyone should feel empowered to learn how to code — and if you’re writing code, you’re coding. Period.

Want to dive deeper? We’ll walk you through the history of HTML/CSS, how it defined the visual language of the 2000s internet (and beyond), and how it can be the foundation for a career in tech. Plus, we’ll share some recommendations for courses that will expand your knowledge of HTML/CSS.

How HTML/CSS became the “power couple” of the 2000s internet

HTML/CSS are often referred to as the “power couple” or “backbone” of everything on the web.

• HTML stands for “HyperText Markup Language,” and it essentially determines how content is organized, formatted, and displayed on a web page (like this one you’re reading right now). When you visit a website, the server sends its HTML files to your browser to read and display.
• CSS is short for “Cascading Style Sheets,” and it’s how you style HTML elements and add stuff like fonts, colors, backgrounds, and layouts.

When the first version of HTML came on the scene in 1993, and people started making web pages, there was no way to control the appearance of the page. In 1994, Norwegian software engineer Håkon Wium Lie proposed using style sheets that could overlay HTML files and customize web pages.

The simple, easy-to-learn technology was a gateway to making websites and having a hand in building the recognizable internet aesthetic of the ‘00s. While there’s much more to web development than these two languages alone, HTML/CSS enabled people to architect the visual language and identity of the early internet.

With HTML/CSS, seemingly anything was possible for code hobbyists: A mess of data could become a neatly organized table, text could change color and be positioned anywhere on the page, and boring white backgrounds were replaced with anything from solid colors to tiled GIFs. For lots of millennials, growing up using websites that encouraged users to get their hands dirty in HTML/CSS — like Myspace, Xanga, and Neopets — was a form of entertainment, self-expression, and an entry point to code.

It’s no exaggeration to say that combining HTML/CSS changed the course of the internet. “Without the visual part, the web would either have looked very boring, with only black and white text, or it would have died,” Håkon said in a 2019 interview.

What people get wrong about using HTML/CSS professionally

There’s a pervasive misconception that certain languages, skills, and even entire career paths aren’t technical enough to be considered part of the professional programming world. People tend to have a “shallow view” of what HTML/CSS is capable of, and skip over learning their newer or more intricate features, explains Ada Rose Canon, a Developer Advocate for the web browser Samsung Internet in London.

Knowing the languages of the internet can help you get hired in the tech industry, whether you want a hands-on technical role that’s involved with building products (like a Web Developer or a UI/UX Designer), or you’re interested in jobs that help tech teams work together and run smoothly (like a Project Manager or Developer Advocate). You might be surprised just how many high-paying tech careers touch HTML/CSS in some capacity: Even Game Developers use HTML to build games that work across platforms, and Back-End Engineers, who might work with other programming languages, need to be well-versed in HTML in order to maintain servers.

HTML is “a skill that’s lost to a lot of developers these days,” Ada Rose says. “They’re so focused on trying to abstract away from HTML and CSS that they don’t fully understand how their final artifact is working, why it works the way it does, and whether what they’ve done is actually correct or just looks good.”

A lot of developers might have an outdated or narrow view of what CSS can do. As you get into advanced CSS, you can make websites that not only look amazing and beautiful, but that also incorporate features that make the web pages come alive, like animations, Nik says. “That, to me, is indistinguishable from coding,” they say. “And furthermore, it’s a skill that I don’t even have — and I’ve been programming for 10 years now.”

What often goes without saying is that the HTML/CSS stigma tends to be gendered. Because front-end development largely deals with aesthetics and making sites look good, there’s an assumption that these are softer skills reserved for women, Ada Rose says. Obviously, undermining people’s knowledge with front-end languages like CSS does everyone a disservice, especially women.

Case in point: Women are underrepresented in technology, making up just 5% of the population of professional developers, according to Stack Overflow’s 2022 Developer Survey.

“There seems to be this pattern — often in the minds of male developers — that CSS is at once, too trivial to bother learning, but at the same time, too complex to be a real language, and too difficult to use,” Ada Rose says. “Like, it’s somehow both of these at the same time.”

The TL;DR of the HTML/CSS debate

Ultimately, the best answer to the debate over whether or not HTML/CSS are legitimate programming languages is: “Does it really matter?” Sarai says. “The distinction isn’t really important and is mostly a semantic argument that’s used so people can feel superior to others because they do ‘real’ programming.”

The truth is that just knowing HTML/CSS alone is probably not enough to break into tech and get hired as a programmer — and that’s okay! Most developers need to be familiar with a handful of languages to be successful over the course of their careers. Once you have an understanding of HTML/CSS, it actually makes picking up other languages much easier. At the end of the day, when you’re using HTML/CSS, you’re still using code to communicate with technology and, crucially, you’re thinking like a programmer to solve problems, which is the foundation for any career as a developer.  

If you’re already using HTML/CSS and your end goal is to get a job, we have tons of courses and resources for professional development that can help you hone your skills and build up your confidence.

Throughout your learning journey, it’s important to know your worth, Ada Rose says. “If people don’t see your value, then don’t listen to them. Clearly, if someone is saying that HTML and CSS isn’t a real language, they don’t know how to do HTML and CSS.” But luckily, you do.

How to get started learning HTML/CSS and more

If you don’t already know HTML/CSS and you’re ready to dive in and learn about web development, check out these courses and paths:

• Learn HTML: Start with the basics of HTML5. You’ll be building and editing web pages right away in this course.
• Learn CSS: After tackling HTML, amp up your websites with colors, backgrounds, photos, and more.
• Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and Github Pages: Get familiar with HTML and CSS at the same time, plus practice building your own website and publishing it to GitHub.
• Front-End Engineer: You can make a career out of making beautiful websites. In this beginner-friendly Career Path, you’ll learn everything you need to know about building and designing websites and prepping for a job in front-end web development.
• Learn Intermediate CSS: Go beyond colors and fonts to explore the dynamic visual effects that you can add to websites using CSS, like animations and transitions.

HTML & CSS Courses & Tutorials | Codecademy

HTML is the foundation of all web pages. It defines the structure of a page, while CSS defines its style. HTML and CSS are the beginning of everything you need to know to make your first web page! Learn both and start creating amazing websites.