Introduction to HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the most widely used language on the Web. As its' name suggests, a markup language refers to a language that used to 'mark up' a document. When you add markup to a Web document, you are adding information to the document that gives additional meaning about a document's structure and formatting, for example, indicating the document's title, lists, tables, paragraphs, formatting style, alignment, etc. This additional information (the HTML markup - elements, attributes and values) are then interpreted by a Web browser, like Microsoft's Internet Explorer ot Mozilla's FireFox to properly display a document to a user on the Web. Thankfully, creating an HTML document for the Web is easy - anyone can do it! that's why the Web is so popular!. The fastest way to explain it is to just take a look at a sample HTML document:

Code Sample:

 <html>
   <head>
      <title>My first HTML page</title>
   </head>
   <body>
      <h1>Hello Internet!</h1>
      <p>This is my very first HTML page.</p>
   </body>
</html>

You can intuitively make sense of this HTML document just by looking at it. The words or letters surrounded by angle brackets (i.e. the "<" and ">") are called markup or tags (they mean the same thing). Here's what the HTML document looks like when rendered in a Web browser:

Code Sample — browser view

Now compare the code of your first HTML page with what the browser has rendered. Notice that in the HTML code, the "My First HTML page" text has been marked up by various tags. The file starts with the <html> tag, indicating the beginning of an HTML file, and ends with the </html> tag, indicating the end of the HTML page.

Next, click here to view the page in a new window. A <title> tag indicates that the "My first HTML page" text should be rendered in the browser's title bar. Similarly, the "Hello Internet!" text which was marked up with the <h1> is rendered by the browser as the page's heading. Finally, the "This is my very first HTML page." text which was marked up with the <p> tag appears as its own paragraph.

Try it out - writing an HTML page is easy — just type out your document's content using Microsoft Notepad or Mac's SimpleText, then add markup elements like <title> (the page title), <h1> (level 1 heading), and <p> (a regular paragraph). Finally, save the file using a .htm or .html file extension (either is fine), and open that file in a browser (for example: c:\temp\firsthtml.htm). Next, we'll learn more about markup and all the different ways to markup a document for the web.

Introduction to HTML: Summary

In this brief introduction to HTML, you learned:

Writing a simple HTML page.
Saving an HTML file using the .htm or .html file extension format
Adding markup to a document so that it can be properly rendered by a Web browser.
Understanding basic HTML syntax for paragaphs, titles and headings, etc.

Web Technologies

Introduction to HTML

Introduction to HTML: Summary