Introduction to HTML

Introduction to HTML

HyperText Markup Language, commonly referred to as HTML, is the standard markup language used to create web pages. Along with CSS, and JavaScript, HTML is a cornerstone technology, used by most websites to create visually engaging webpages, user interfaces for web applications, and user interfaces for many mobile applications. Web browsers can read HTML files and render them into visible or audible web pages. HTML describes the structure of a website semantically along with cues for presentation, making it a markup language, rather than a programming language.
  • HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
  • A markup language is a set of markup tags
  • HTML documents are described by HTML tags
  • Each HTML tag describes different document content

HTML Document Example 

<!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 declaration defines the document type to be HTML
  • The text between <html> and </html> describes an HTML document
  • The text between <head> and </head> provides information about the document
  • The text between <title> and </title> provides a title for the document
  • The text between <body> and </body> describes the visible page content
  • The text between <h1> and </h1> describes a heading
  • The text between <p> and </p> describes a paragraph

HTML Tags

HTML tags are keywords (tag names) surrounded by angle brackets:
<tagname>content</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 slash before the tag name 

The <!DOCTYPE> Declaration

The <!DOCTYPE> declaration helps the browser to display a web page correctly.
There are different document types on the web.
To display a document correctly, the browser must know both type and version.
The doctype declaration is not case sensitive. All cases are acceptable:
 
<!DOCTYPE html>

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

<!doctype html>

<!Doctype Html>

Common Declarations

HTML5

<!DOCTYPE html>

HTML 4.01

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

XHTML 1.0

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

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