Introduction to HTML



Introduction to HTML

So, you want to make a website, but you have no idea how. We're going to start at the very beginning by learning hypertext markup language, which was more commonly known as HTML. As we move along our learning, we'll get into the full technical details of HTML and build some simple web pages.

What is HTML?

HTML is an initialism that stands for hypertext markup language. There's two parts to this: hypertext and markup language. However, we are going to focus on the markup language part first. A markup language is not the same as a programming language.

When we use a programming language, we are describing how something should behave. Rather, markup languages are used to annotate and add semantic structure, or meaning, to a text document. So fundamentally, you can think about a web page in terms of the text with markup added on top.

The general concept and term "Markup." evolved from the idea of a book editor or writing instructor marking up a document with a pen or pencil, similar to what you might remember from school. However, HTML isn't intended to suggest corrections to text, rather it structures and shapes the text in a way that makes it easier to understand, both for people like you and me as well as for the software that interprets the markup

HTML is a markup language for describing web documents (web pages). 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

Sample HTML Program


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Every HTML document must contain the following tag elements. Each tag has a different meaning

The DOCTYPE declaration defines the document type to be HTML

<html> and </html> Describes the HTML document

<head> and </head> This tag provides the basic information about the document

<title> and </title> Title of the HTML document

<body> and </body> Describes main HTML body content in the document

<h1> , <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6> etc Describes the heading tags for the document

<p> and </p> Describes the paragraph elements

HTML Versions

Since the early days of web, there have been many versions of HTML

Version Year
HTML 1991
HTML2.0 1995
HTML3.2 1997
HTML4.01 1999
XHTML 2000
HTML5 2014


Declaring HTML in Document

HTML5

(Current Version)

The below example code shows how the HTML can be declared in HTML5

Example
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HTML 4.01

The below example code shows how the HTML can be declared in HTML4.01


Example
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XHTML 1.0

The below example code shows how the HTML can be declared in XHTML1.0


Example
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Property
HTML (Yes) (Yes) (Yes) (Yes) (Yes) (Yes) (Yes)