Introduction to HTML

Author: MDBootstrap

What is HTML?

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications. With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, it forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web.

A simple HTML example

Here's what the HTML code looks like:


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

And here's what the above code looks like in your web browser:

My First Heading

My first paragraph.

Explanation of the above example

  • The <!DOCTYPE html> declaration defines this document to be HTML5
  • The <html> element is the root element of an HTML page
  • The <head> element contains meta information about the document
  • The <title> 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

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:

Browser

Note: On the screenshot above, I added HTML tags in brackets only for hints. In normal situation, the browser will not render them - it will only display their content.

HTML Page Structure

Below is a visualization of an HTML page structure:

<html></html>
<head></head>
<title>Page title</title>
<body></body>
<h1>I am a heading</h1>
<p>I am a paragraph</p>
<p>I am another paragraph</p>

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

The <!DOCTYPE> Declaration

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:


                      <!DOCTYPE html>

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
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