HTML – Overview

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is the most widely used language and is most commonly to write Web Pages. in this day and age, every designer and developer whether a systems developer or web developer must learn this language.

HTML is the standard markup language for creating web pages. It is used to describe the structure of a web page using a collection of elements known as tags. These elements are used to tell the browser how to render the content of a web page or HTML document.

A Basic HTML Document

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
   <head>
      <title>This is document title</title>
   </head>	
   <body>
      <h1>A Simple heading</h1>
      <p>Hello World paragraph!</p>
   </body>	
</html>

The Above Example Explained

HTML elements contain one or two tags. They are enclosed within angle braces like this <HTML tag> which is the actual tag. Some tags are standalone while others require a corresponding closing tag like this opening tag <html> and closing tag </html>.

Let’s break down the above example tags.

  • The <!DOCTYPE html> declaration defines the document type (HTML) and HTML version (HTML5)
  • The <html> element is the root element of a HTML document
  • The <head> element represents the document header and contains meta information about the HTML page
  • The <title> element specifies a title for the web page. This is shown in the browser’s title bar or in the web page’s tab
  • The <body> element defines the document’s body, which is the primary container for all the visible content
  • The <h1> element defines heading, in this case a level 1 or largest heading
  • The <p> element defines a paragraph

So generally an HTML document consists of the enclosing element that defines the document, the header section, and the body section as seen here.

<html>
   <head>
      The content here is not displayed in the browser but is used as meta information
   </head>	
   <body>
      The content that appears here is usually what is displayed in the browser
   </body>	
</html>

Web Browser

One typically uses a web browser such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. to read HTML documents and render them correctly to the viewer. A web browser uses HTML tags to determine how to display the document.

In this HTML tutorial, we will be following the latest HTML5 standard.

[ 1 ] – HTML5 Specification