What is HTML?
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
A Small HTML Document
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
Try it Yourself ยป
Example Explained
The <!DOCTYPE html> declaration defines this document to be HTML5
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 will display a document with a heading and a paragraph.
HTML Tags
HTML tags are keywords (tag names) surrounded by angle brackets:
<tagname>content goes here...</tagname>
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
The end tag is written like the start tag, but with a forward slash inserted before the tag name
The start tag is also called the opening tag, and the end tag 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:
View in Browser
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>
</html>
Only the <body> section (the white area above) is displayed in a browser.
The <!DOCTYPE> Declaration
The <!DOCTYPE> declaration represents the document type, and helps the browser to display a web page correctly.
It must only appear once, at the top of the page (before any HTML tags).
There are different document types. To display a web page correctly, the browser must know both type and version.
The doctype declaration is not case sensitive. All cases are acceptable:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<!doctype HTML>
Common <!DOCTYPE> Declarations
HTML5
<!DOCTYPE html>
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 W3Schools use HTML5.
HTML Versions
Since the early days of the web, there have been many versions of HTML:
Version Year
HTML 1991
HTML 2.0 1995
HTML 3.2 1997
HTML 4.01 1999
XHTML 2000
HTML5 2014
<a href="https://coince.com/?u=C9925923"><img src="http://d3egzi0yt25uex.cloudfront.net/bitcoin/coince/1.gif" width="728" height="90" alt="Coince - Bitcoin Investment Solution" border="0"></a>
<a href="https://coince.com/?u=C9925923"><img src="http://d3egzi0yt25uex.cloudfront.net/bitcoin/coince/2.gif" width="468" height="60" alt="Coince - Bitcoin Investment Solution" border="0"></a>
<a href="https://coince.com/?u=C9925923"><img src="http://d3egzi0yt25uex.cloudfront.net/bitcoin/coince/3.gif" width="160" height="600" alt="Coince - Bitcoin Investment Solution" border="0"></a>
