What is HTML? Introduction
Did you just decide to learn web development? HTML is the first language that you have to learn to become a web developer. And luckily, it is the easiest one and you will enjoy learning it.
Here in this first tutorial of the HTML series, you will see the complete introduction to HTML and the important things before getting started.
So, let’s begin.
What is HTML?
HTML stands for “Hypertext Markup Language”. In simple words, HTML is the language that we use to create web pages. It is the language that is running behind this web page too.
HTML is also known as the standard markup language. It means that it is the type of language that defines the structure of a web page. It is purely developed to define the structure of a web page. And it is the language that every web developer learns at the start.
Founder: Tim Berners-Lee developed this language in 1990.
Now, the current version of HTML is HTML5. All modern browsers are compatible with HTML5.
Where to Write HTML Code?
The simple answer is: in Text Editor. Also, known as a source code editor.
A text editor is a computer program that is used for writing and editing the source code of computer programs, websites, and web applications.
And these computer programs are freely available on the internet. Just check out these top 5 text editors and choose anyone of them.
For this HTML course, we’ll use Visual Studio Code. You can download it from their official website. It’s available for free. I also recommend you this text editor.
So I am going to use visual studio code to write code. After downloading the visual studio code editor, install it on your pc with default settings. After opening it, this will look like this as shown in the image below.
Text editors do the whole job for us and make coding easy. And browsers are designed to process the code and display it in human-readable form. We’ll discuss it further in our other web tutorials.
We’ll learn to create our first HTML webpage in our next tutorial. Just take a minute and let’s see how HTML works.
How HTML works?
Basically, HTML consists of tags, elements, and attributes. We use these elements and tags to define our web page’s structure.
It is very simple. If you want to write a paragraph on your webpage, you use a pair of tags. For paragraph, we use <p> tag, like this code below.
<p> This is a paragraph text. All the text should be inside these tags. </p>
After saving this code in your text editor open the HTML file in your browser, and you will see the text without tags. Because your browser is processing the code and displaying the output.
In HTML, all the tags are pre-defined. It means you have a certain number of tags that you use again and again. And don’t worry, these tags are less than 20. There are just a few more tags but you don’t have to learn everything. We use just 20 tags or sometimes less to make a whole web page.
These tags tell your browser what the content is about. Like it tells the browser about headings, paragraphs, quotes, headers, footers, etc. It gives structure to our website. And without structure, we can’t build a website. HTML is the base of a website. After that, CSS and JavaScript come next.
For example, if you want to show a heading on your web page then you simply use heading tags like h1, h2, and so on. And if you want to show a link then you use a <a> tag. We’ll talk about it in detail in our later tutorials.
That’s it, I hope you know understood well.
If you have any questions. Then, you can ask any question in the comment section below.
What’s Next?
- Next, check out this tutorial to create your first webpage that writes HTML Hello World with Code Examples.
Topic: HTML
