What is HTML

The full form of html is HyperText Markup Language. Every web page is actually a HTML file. Each HTML file is just a plain-text file, but with a .html file extension instead of .txt, and is made up of many HTML tags as well as the content for a web page.

HTML tags are the hidden keywords within a web page that define how your web browser must format and display the content. HTML consists of a series of elements, which you use to enclose, or wrap, different parts of the content to make it appear a certain way, or act a certain way.

The enclosing tags can make a word or image hyperlink to somewhere else, can italicize words, and can make font bigger or smaller, and so on.

The various elements are

• The doctype. In the mists of time, when HTML was young (about 1991/2), doctypes were meant to act as links to a set of rules that the HTML page had to follow to be considered good HTML, which could mean automatic error checking and other useful things. However, these days no one really cares about them, and they are really just a historical artefact that needs to be included for everything to work right. For now, that's all you need to know.




• The < html> element. This element wraps all the content on the entire page, and is sometimes known as the root element.




• The < head> element. This element acts as a container for all the stuff you want to include on the HTML page that isn't the content you are showing to your page's viewers. This includes things like keywords and a page description that you want to appear in search results, CSS to style our content, character set declarations, and more.




• The < body> element. This contains all the content that you want to show to web users when they visit your page, whether that's text, images, videos, games, playable audio tracks, or whatever else.




• < meta charset="utf-8"> — this element sets the character set your document should use to UTF-8, which includes most characters from the vast majority of human written languages. Essentially it can now handle any textual content you might put on it. There is no reason not to set this, and it can help avoid some problems later on.




• The < title> element. This sets the title of your page, which is the title that appears in the browser tab the page is loaded in. It is also used to describe the page when you bookmark/favourite it.

The main parts of our element are:

• The opening tag: This consists of the name of the element (in this case, p), wrapped in opening and closing angle brackets. This states where the element begins, or starts to take effect — in this case where the paragraph begins.




• The closing tag: This is the same as the opening tag, except that it includes a forward slash before the element name. This states where the element ends — in this case where the end of the paragraph is. Failing to include a closing tag is one of the common beginner errors and can lead to strange results.




• The content: This is the content of the element, which in this case is just text.