Introduction to HTML
In this tutorial, the basic concepts of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is described.
HTML, an abbreviation of Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on — and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML is written in the form of tags, surrounded by angle brackets (i.e. <>). HTML can also describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document, and can include embedded scripting language code (such as JavaScript) which can affect the behavior of web browsers and other HTML processors.
Hypertext is text, displayed on a computer, with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or key press sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other things. The most extensive example of hypertext today is the World Wide Web.
A markup language is a set of annotations to text that describe how something is to be structured, laid out, or formatted. Electronic document markup languages are embedded markup codes used to construct structured documents, used in computer typesetting, word processors, web-document editors and web browsers.
HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language. A markup language is actually a set of markup tags. HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages. The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page. HTML documents are text files made up of HTML elements. An HTML file must have an .htm or .html file extension. An HTML file can be created using a simple text editor.
Features of HTML
- HTML markup tags are usually called HTML tags
- HTML tags are keywords surrounded by angle brackets like <>
- HTML tags normally come in pairs like <p> and </p>
- The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
- Start and end tags are also called opening tags and closing tags
- The text between the start and end tags is the element content
- HTML tags are not case sensitive, <p> means the same as <P>
Φ We start with HTML here followed by CSS.