An Introduction to HTML

HTML Tutorial showing how to make a simple webpage in a texteditor like notepad

HTML is used to "Markup" text and multimedia. HTML can be considered text files with the .html or .htm file extensions, which includes extra Markup codes.

These Markup codes generally consist of opening and closing tags which make up the elements on the page. This can be anything from normal text, to images and active-x components such as flash. Elements can either be block-level elements, or inline-elements.

The user agent (aka the browser), will use the Markup to distinguish between Paragraphs and Headings, as well as Multimedia. The web designer can use the Markup to change the styles of text, such as color; font-size; and text-decoration by using the relevant CSS Properties.

Your First HTML Page

Lets start Learning By Doing!

All html documents needs a head; body; and a title. We also need to tell the browser, that we are going to write html, this is done by the use of the html tag. We should also declare the doctype, this will tell the browser to render the page in "standards mode". If we don't declare a doctype, it just gets harder to make the page render as intended, cross multiple browsers and platforms.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en-US">

  <head>
    <title>My first Website</title>
  </head>

  <body>
    <p>My first Website.</p>
  </body>

</html>

Brugbart Vision!

The first line, declares the doctype, for more information on doctypes, see: The Importance of Doctypes

<!DOCTYPE html>

The "lang" attribute on the html tag, is mostly used by search engines, to determine the language of your page, but applications such as screen readers, can use it to help determine the language which is used.

<html lang="en-US">

The head section is primarily used for Meta Data, Document Title; and StyleSheet'(s).

<head>
</head>

The body section is used for page content.

<body>
</body>

Next: An Introduction to CSS