HTML Introduction
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
A Simple HTML Document
Example
Page Title
My First Heading
My first paragraph.
Example Explained
The declaration defines this document to be HTML5
The element is the root element of an HTML page
The element contains meta information about the document
The
element specifies a title for the document
The <body> element contains the visible page content
The <h1> element defines a large heading
The <p> element defines a paragraph
HTML Tags
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.
Web Browsers
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:
View in Browser
HTML Page Structure
Below is a visualization of an HTML page structure:
<html>
<head>
<title>Page title
This is a heading
This is a paragraph.
This is another paragraph.
Note: Only the content inside the section (the white area above) is displayed in a browser.
The Declaration
The 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 declaration is not case sensitive.
The declaration for HTML5 is:
HTML Versions
Since the early days of the web, there have been many versions of HTML:
Version Year
HTML 1991
HTML 2.0 1995
HTML 3.2 1997
HTML 4.01 1999
XHTML 2000
HTML5 2014
