What is HTML?

HTML is an abbreviation for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a bundle of markup tags, which is widely popular these days to develop the web pages. They are saved with an extension of HTML and defined with HTML tags within any file (notepad or other appropriate editors). The HTML tags used within the content, defines the various document elements.

HTML also enables a content to introduce hypertext within it which can aid users to navigate easily. For those, who do not know about hypertext – it is the way by which Web Pages are linked all together.

Origin of HTML

In late 1991, Berners-Lee developed HTML and later its first standard specification came into light in 1995 and it became popular as HTML2.0. The major version, HTML 4.01 published in 1999. Till date, HTML 4.01 is widely popular and used by web professionals and non-professionals, but now we also do have HTML 5 which is an extension of HTML 4.01 and this got published in 2012.

HTML, was developed with an intent of declaring the structure of a specific page such as paragraphs, headings, lists and much more. This enables researchers to share scientific information. In simple words, it enables the users to provide formatting to web pages using various tags in HTML language.

Example –

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>MY WEB PAGE</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>HEADING 1</h1>
<p>This is the body of the article or content</p>
</body>
</html>

HTML Tags – An overview

Another name for HTML tags is the keyword or tag names which are enclosed between the angle brackets.

Example –

<tagname>content</tagname>

HTML tags are declared in pairs – <p> and </p>
The first tag is known as start tag.
The second tag known as end tag and is differed by the first tag only with a slash before the tag name.
The HTML tags are not case sensitive.

A Few Widely Used HTML Tags

<!DOCTYPE> – It reflects the type of document and the HTML version used. You may vary HTML version as per the development needs.

<html> – It defines the entire HTML document and mainly comprised of the header which are declared using tags, including <head>, <body> and others.

<head> – It declares the header part of the webpage and includes tags such as <title> and <link>. Meta tags are also placed in head tag.

<title> – As mentioned earlier, it is declared within the <head> tags and is used to define the title of the webpage.

<body> – It defines the body of the webpage among which there are various tags, including <h1>, <p>, <div> and many more.

<h1> – The heading of the content or the web page content is defined under this tag.

<p> – The paragraphs of the content or the web page content is defined under this tag.

This is not the end of the HTML tag’s list as there are many more which you need to dig-out while developing textual document. Learning HTML is a very easy task as it only requires a little of the efforts and dedication in contrast to other web design and development languages.

Note – W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommends to employ tags in lowercase starting from HTML 4.0.

HTML Coding Structure

<!DOCTYPE html>          //Defining document and type of HTML version used
<html>
<head>                  // Header Tags of Document
</head>
<body>                  // Body Tags of Document
</body>
</html>

Some Common Declarations

HTML 5 –

<!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">

Summary

This tutorial has been designed for the aspiring or newbie Web designers and developers who are seeking the platform to learn HTML from the scratch. The practical examples have been introduced to make the things understand better. So get started with it and take yourself to the level of expertise. In case, you feel to ask any query and want us to elaborate more, drop your comments below.

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