HTML
is the standard markup language for creating Web pages.
- Full-form of HTML is 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
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
Example
Explained
<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 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
- The start tag is also called the opening tag, and the end tag as 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:
HTML Page Structure
Below is a visualization of an HTML page structure:
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:
