HTML Introduction

What is HTML?

HTML is a language for describing web pages.

• HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
• HTML is a markup language
• A markup language is a set of markup tags
• The tags describe document content
• HTML documents contain HTML tags and plain text
• HTML documents are also called web page

HTML Example

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<h1>My First Heading</h1>

<p>My first paragraph.</p>

</body>
</html>

Example Explained

• The DOCTYPE declaration defines the document type
• The text between <html> and </html> describes the web page
• The text between <body> and </body> is the visible page content
• The text between <h1> and </h1> is displayed as a heading
• The text between <p> and </p> is displayed as a paragraph

HTML Element Syntax

• An HTML element starts with a start tag / opening tag
• An HTML element ends with an end tag / closing tag
• The element content is everything between the start and the end tag
• Some HTML elements have empty content
• Empty elements are closed in the start tag
• Most HTML elements can have attributes

HTML Attributes

• HTML elements can have attributes
• Attributes provide additional information about an element
• Attributes are always specified in the start tag
• Attributes come in name/value pairs like: name="value"