Tier 1 · Recommended · not required
Foundations of Web Programming
A five-week, framework-free bridge that builds the web-platform fluency SWE 200 assumes on day one — HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, by hand.
- Duration
- 5 weeks
- Tier
- Tier 1 · Foundations
- Certificate
- WIATech Certificate in Foundations of Web Programming
A non-gated, recommended bridge that builds the platform underneath the framework. SWE 200 Module 01 begins at React, Next.js and Tailwind, assuming fluency in HTML, CSS and browser JavaScript. WEB 35 builds exactly that platform fluency — entirely by hand, with no frameworks or build tools — so the diploma's tools later feel like natural solutions rather than magic. By the end, a graduate can build a small, responsive, accessible, interactive page from scratch and recognise exactly what React, Next.js and Tailwind are doing.
§ What you'll be able to do
- Explain how the web works as a platform — request/response, the browser as a runtime, rendering
- Write semantic, accessible HTML and reason about the DOM tree it produces
- Style with CSS confidently — box model, cascade and specificity, Flexbox, Grid, responsive design
- Reason about CSS's declarative paradigm as distinct from imperative programming
- Manipulate the DOM and handle events with JavaScript, including propagation
- Work with asynchronous JavaScript — Promises, async / await, fetch, consuming APIs
- Build a complete small web application from scratch with no framework
- Articulate what frameworks solve, having felt the problems React, Tailwind and Next.js address
§ What you'll cover
The Web Platform and Semantic HTML
What the web is as a software platform, and HTML as the information architecture of a document — including the DOM and accessibility.
CSS — The Cascade, the Box Model, and Visual Systems
The largest module: CSS as a declarative system — cascade, specificity, the box model, Flexbox, Grid and responsive design.
JavaScript in the Browser — The DOM and Events
The browser-facing half of JavaScript — DOM manipulation, events, the event loop, async, and fetch.
Integration — Seeing What Frameworks Solve
Wiring HTML, CSS and JavaScript into complete applications by hand, and feeling the pain frameworks exist to solve.
Capstone
The Hand-Built Web Application
A complete, working web application in semantic HTML, responsive accessible CSS and vanilla JavaScript with no framework — accompanied by a "what a framework would solve" reflection, a Git history, and an oral defence.
§ Tools you'll use
- A modern browser with developer tools
- VS Code with the Live Server extension
- Git
- A screen reader for accessibility testing
§ Where it leads
The only non-gated, recommended foundation — recommended, not required, before SWE 200. It ends exactly where SWE 200 Module 01 begins, so the diploma introduces React, Next.js, Tailwind and TypeScript as the professional solutions to problems the student has already felt by hand.