Lessons
HTML
- HTML HOME
- HTML Introduction
- HTML Editors
- HTML Basic
- HTML Elements
- HTML Attributes
- HTML Headings
- HTML Paragraphs
- HTML Styles
- HTML Formatting
- HTML Quotations
- HTML Comments
- HTML Colors
- HTML CSS
- HTML Links
- HTML Images
- HTML Tables
- HTML Lists
- HTML Blocks
- HTML Classes
- HTML Id
- HTML Iframes
- HTML JavaScript
- HTML File Paths
- HTML Head
- HTML Layout
- HTML Responsive
- HTML Computercode
- HTML Entities
- HTML Symbols
- HTML Charset
HTML5
HTML Graphics
HTML Media
HTML APIs
HTML Examples
HTML References
- HTML Tag List
- HTML Events
- HTML Colors
- HTML Canvas
- HTML Audio/Video
- HTML Doctypes
- HTML Character Sets
- HTML URL Encode
- HTML Lang Codes
- HTML Messages
- HTML Methods
- PX to Em Converter
- Keyboard Shortcuts
HTML Forms
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
<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
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:
HTML Page Structure
Below is a visualization of an HTML page structure:
Note: Only the content inside the <body> section (the white area 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 |