What is JavaScript?

What is JavaScript doing on your page?

Here we'll actually start looking at some code, and while doing so, explore what actually happens when you run some JavaScript in your page.

Let's briefly recap the story of what happens when you load a web page in a browser (first talked about in our How CSS works article). When you load a web page in your browser, you are running your code (the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) inside an execution environment (the browser tab). This is like a factory that takes in raw materials (the code) and outputs a product (the web page).

A very common use of JavaScript is to dynamically modify HTML and CSS to update a user interface, via the Document Object Model API (as mentioned above). Note that the code in your web documents is generally loaded and executed in the order it appears on the page. Errors may occur if JavaScript is loaded and run before the HTML and CSS that it is intended to modify. You will learn ways around this later in the article, in the Script loading strategies section.