HTML Introduction

Zahid Farid

8 years ago

What is HTML?

HTML is the standard markup language for creating Web pages.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
HTML describes the structure of Web pages using markup
HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages
HTML elements are represented by tags
HTML tags label pieces of content such as “heading”, “paragraph”, “table”, and so on
Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to render the content of the page

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body><h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p></body>
</html>

HTML tags are element names surrounded by angle brackets:

<tagname>content goes here…</tagname>

HTML tags normally come in pairs like <p> and </p>
The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
The end tag is written like the start tag, but with a forward slash inserted before the tag name

Tip: The start tag is also called the opening tag, and the end tag the closing tag.

The purpose of a web browser (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari) is to read HTML documents and display them.

The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses them to determine how to display the document:

Below is a visualization of an HTML page structure:

Note: Only the content inside the <body> section (the white area above) is displayed in a browser.

The <!DOCTYPE> declaration represents the document type, and helps browsers to display web pages correctly.

It must only appear once, at the top of the page (before any HTML tags).

The <!DOCTYPE> declaration is not case sensitive.

The <!DOCTYPE> declaration for HTML5 is:

Since the early days of the web, there have been many versions of HTML: