HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language for creating a webpage. Webpages are usually viewed in a web browser. They can include writing, links, pictures, and even sound and video. ... HTML was made by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There are several versions of HTML.
- HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
- HTML describes the structure of a Web page
- HTML consists of a series of elements
- HTML elements tell the browser how to display the content
- HTML elements are represented by tags
- HTML tags label pieces of content such as "heading", "paragraph", "table", and so on
- Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to render the content of the page
Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document.
HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Tags such as <img> and <input> directly introduce content into the page. Other tags such as
surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page.
HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript, which affects the behavior and content of web pages. Inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), former maintainer of the HTML and current maintainer of the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML since 1997.
Web pages can be created and modified by using professional HTML editors. However, for learning HTML we recommend a simple text editor like Notepad (PC) or TextEdit (Mac).
We believe using a simple text editor is a good way to learn HTML. Follow the steps below to create your first web page with Notepad or TextEdit.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<title>Page Title</title>
<h1>This is a Heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
Attributes are used to provide additional information about HTML elements. You will learn more about attributes in a later chapter.
HTML elements can be nested (elements can contain elements) All HTML documents consist of nested HTML elements This example contains four HTML elements:
All HTML elements can have attributes Attributes provide additional information about an element Attributes are always specified in the start tag Attributes usually come in name/value pairs like: name="value"
The alt attribute specifies an alternative text to be used, if an image cannot be displayed. The value of the alt attribute can be read by screen readers. This way, someone "listening" to the webpage, e.g. a vision impaired person, can "hear" the element. Example