Learn HTML
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, which is the most widely used language on Web to develop web pages.
HTML was created by Berners-Lee in late 1991 but "HTML 2.0" was the
first standard HTML specification which was published in 1995. HTML 4.01
was a major version of HTML and it was published in late 1999. Though
HTML 4.01 version is widely used but currently we are having HTML-5
version which is an extension to HTML 4.01, and this version was
published in 2012
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and it is the most widely used language to write Web Pages.
- Hypertext refers to the way in which Web pages (HTML documents) are linked together. Thus the link available on a webpage are called Hypertext.
- As its name suggests, HTML is a Markup Language which means you use HTML to simply "mark up" a text document with tags that tell a Web browser how to structure it to display.
Originally, HTML was developed with the intent of defining the structure
of documents like headings, paragraphs, lists, and so forth to
facilitate the sharing of scientific information between researchers.
Now, HTML is being widely used to format web pages with the help of different tags available in HTML language.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>This is document title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a heading</h1>
<p>Document content goes here.....</p>
</body>
</html>
Basic HTML Document
In its simplest form, following is an example of an HTML document:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>This is document title</title> </head> <body> <h1>This is a heading</h1> <p>Document content goes here.....</p> </body> </html>
Either you can use Try it option
available at the top right corner of the code box to check the result of
this HTML code, or let's save it in an HTML file test.htmusing
your favorite text editor. Finally open it using a web browser like
Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, or Firefox etc. It must show the
following output:
HTML Tags
As told earlier, HTML is a markup language and makes use of various tags
to format the content. These tags are enclosed within angle braces <Tag Name>. Except few tags, most of the tags have their corresponding closing tags. For example <html> has its closing tag </html> and <body> tag has its closing tag </body> tag etc.
Above example of HTML document uses folloiwng tags| Tag | Description |
|---|---|
| <!DOCTYPE...> | This tag defines the document type and HTML version. |
| <html> | This tag encloses the complete HTML document and mainly comprises of document header which is represented by<head>...</head> and document body which is represented by <body>...</body> tags. |
| <head> | This tag represents the document's header which can keep other HTML tags like <title>, <link> etc. |
| <title> | The <title> tag is used inside the <head> tag to mention the document title. |
| <body> | This tag represents the document's body which keeps other HTML tags like <h1>, <div>, <p> etc. |
| <h1> | This tag represents the heading. |
| <p> | This tag represents a paragraph. |
To learn HTML, you will need to study various tags and understand how do
they behave while formatting a textual document. Learning HTML is
simple as users have to learn the usage of different tags in order to
format the text or images to make a beautiful webpage.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends to use lowercase tags starting from HTML 4.
HTML Document Structure
A typical HTML document will have following structure:
Document declaration tag
<html>
<head>
Document header related tags
</head>
<body>
Document body related tags
</body>
</html>
We will study all the header and body tags in subsequent chapters, for now let's see what is document declaration tag.
The <!DOCTYPE> Declaration
The <!DOCTYPE> declaration tag is used by the web browser to
understand the version of the HTML used in the document. Current version
of HTML is 5 and it makes use of the following declaration:
<!DOCTYPE html>
There are many other declaration types which can be used in HTML
document depending on what version of HTML is being used. We will see
more details on this while discussing <!DOCTYPE...> tag along with
other HTML tags.
An HTML element is defined by a
starting tag. If the element contains other content, it ends with a
closing tag, where the element name is preceded by a forward slash as
shown below with few tags:
| Start Tag | Content | End Tag |
|---|---|---|
| <p> | This is paragraph content. | </p> |
| <h1> | This is heading content. | </h1> |
| <div> | This is division content. | </div> |
| <br /> |
So here <p>....</p> is an HTML element,
<h1>...</h1> is another HTML element. There are some HTML
elements which don't need to be closed, such as <img.../>, <hr
/> and <br /> elements. These are known as void elements.
HTML documents consist of a tree of these elements and they specify how
HTML documents should be built, and what kind of content should be
placed in what part of an HTML document.
HTML Tag vs. Element
An HTML element is defined by a starting tag. If the element contains other content, it ends with a closing tag.
For example <p> is starting tag of a paragraph and </p> is closing tag of the same paragraph but <p>This is paragraph</p> is a paragraph element.
