HTML Introduction

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

HTML Example

A small HTML document:

<!DOCTYPEhtml>
<html>
<head>
<title> Page Title </title>
</head>
<body>

<h1> This is a Heading </h1>
<p> This is a paragraph. </p>
</body>
</html>

Try yourself >>

Example Explained

The DOCTYPE declaration defines the document type to be HTML
The text between<html> and <html>describes an HTML document
The text between<head> and <head>provides information about the document
The text between<title> and <title>provides a title for the document
The text between<body> and <body>describes the visible page content
The text between<h1> and <h1>describes a heading
The text between<p> and <p>describes a paragraph.

Using this description, a web browser can display a document with a heading and a paragraph.

HTML Tags

HTML tags are keywords (tag names) surrounded by angle brackets:

< tagname > content < / tagname >

HTML tags normally come in pairs <p> and <p>
A markup language is a set of markup tags
HTML documents are described by HTML tags
Each HTML tag describes different document content

The start tag is often called the opening tag. The end tag is often called 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:

<html>

<head>

<title>Page title</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

<p>This is another paragraph.</p>

</body>

Only the </body> area (the white area) is displayed by the browser.

The </!DOCTYPE> Declaration

The </!DOCTYPE>declaration helps the browser to display a web page correctly.

There are different document types on the web.

To display a document correctly, the browser must know both type and version.

The doctype declaration is not case sensitive. All cases are acceptable:

</!DOCTYPE html>

</!DOCTYPE HTML>

</!doctype html>

</!Doctype Html>

Common Declarations

HTML5

</!DOCTYPE>

HTML 4.01

</!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

XHTML 1.0

</!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

All tutorials and examples at Main Coding use HTML5.

HTML Map