HTML for beginners
HTML is an acronym that stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Every good web developer must have a good understanding of HTML before moving on to CSS and other programming languages. HTML can be broken down into two parts, and I will be giving you an insight into what they are. They are
- Hypertext
- Markup Language
What does Hypertext mean?
HyperText, a term coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 simply means a text which contains links to other text. The hypertext enables users to move from one part of a webpage to another by simply clicking on a link. Hypertext contains hyperlinks (words, icons, images graphics) that enable users to move to a new section of a webpage.
What is a Markup language?
For a computer to get work done, it needs to be given certain instructions by the programmer, in a language that the computer will understand. The Markup language is one such language. HTML and XML are the two most popular markup languages. A markup language is a system of presenting a document in a manner that is syntactically different from a text. Markup languages are usually not displayed on the screen for the users, they serve as a way to structure the overall view of the webpage. Markup language makes use of tags to define elements within a document. Tags are simply tools that indicate what should appear on a website and how they should be displayed. Tags consist of an opening bracket (<) the content and a closing bracket (/>) example:
<p> Today is a beautiful day</p>
The <P> tag stands for a paragraph and the content of the paragraph is "This is a very good day" while </P> indicates the end of that paragraph.
There are thousands of HTML tags available and it is impossible to know all of them by heart, however, there are tags that are commonly used by developers, and examples of such tags are
<html> </html> this stands for the entire HTML document
<head> </head> contains important information such as the title, links to scripts, etc about the documents
<body> </body> contains all other content in the html document.
<h1> to <h6> makes certain text stand out more than the rest.
Some HTML tags are self-closing tags. In order words, they do not need a separate closing tag and they do not have content. Examples of such tags are
<img> <input> <links> <br> <meta> <hr> etc
Markup languages can be read by both humans and computers.
You can visit w3schools for more examples of html tags.
