title: Approach to building a GUI for a web application
body: <p>First, a short disclaimer. I have next to no knowledge about web applications. I come from an iOS background where I exclusively wrote native code, so if you write your answers like I know nothing outside the shallow parts, that would be great.</p>
  
  <p>I'm interested in learning a stack to develop web applications, but I'm not sure what the right way to build the GUI is. I know that a web front end consists of html and CSS to create the display and javascript as the bridge between the back end and the GUI, but I don't know the best way to put something together. </p>
  
  <p>I know in iOS, you can use the Interface Builder (part of xcode that lets you graphically create the xml that describes the display) to create GUI's without any knowledge of how iOS translates the xml to some rendering, or even what is written in your xml files. Is there any analog to the web front end? </p>
  
  <p>I'm mainly just looking for a list of the accepted ways to develop the GUI for a web application. If I have to learn HTML and CSS, so be it, but I'd like to know what my options are and the tradeoffs between each of them.</p>