HTML Introduction
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the standard language used to create and design documents on the World Wide Web.
What is HTML?
- HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language
- HTML describes the structure of a Web page
- HTML consists of a series of elements
- HTML elements tell the browser how to display the content
- HTML elements label pieces of content such as "this is a heading", "this is a paragraph", "this is a link", etc.
A Simple HTML Document
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
Example Explained
- The
<!DOCTYPE html>declaration defines that this document is an HTML5 document - The
<html>element is the root element of an HTML page - The
<head>element contains meta information about the HTML page - The
<title>element specifies a title for the HTML page - The
<body>element defines the document's body, and is a container for all the visible contents - 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, and the second tag is the end tag.
💡 Pro Tip: Always close your tags! While browsers are forgiving, unclosed tags can cause unpredictable rendering.
Web Browsers
The purpose of a web browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari) is to read HTML documents and display them correctly. A browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses them to determine how to display the document.