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 Page Title

My First Heading

My first paragraph.

Try it Yourself » Example Explained The declaration defines this document to be HTML5 The text between and describes an HTML document The text between and provides information about the document The text between and provides a title for the document The text between and describes the visible page content The text between

and

describes a heading The text between

and

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: content goes here... HTML tags normally come in pairs like

and

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: Page title

This is a heading

This is a paragraph.

This is another paragraph.

Only the section (the white area above) is displayed in a browser. The Declaration The 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: Common Declarations HTML5 HTML 4.01 XHTML 1.0 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