What is HTML anyway?
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Developed by scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, HTML is the "hidden" code that helps us communicate with others on the World Wide Web (WWW).
When writing HTML, you add "tags" to the text in order to create the structure. These tags tell the browser how to display the text or graphics in the document.
HTML Example
A small HTML document:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
Try it Yourself »
Example Explained
- The DOCTYPE declaration defines the document type to be HTML
- The text between <html> and </html> describes an HTML document
- The text between <head> and </head> provides information about the document
- The text between <title> and </title> provides a title for the document
- The text between <body> and </body> describes the visible page content
- The text between <h1> and </h1> describes a heading
- The text between <p> and </p> describes paragraph
Using this description, a web browser can display a document with a heading and a paragraph.
HTML Tags
HTML tags are keywords (tag names) surrounded by angle brackets:
<tagname>content</tagname>
- HTML tags normally come in pairs like <p> and </p>
- The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
- The end tag is written like the start tag, but with a slash before the tag name
 | The start tag is often called the opening tag. The end tag is often called the closing tag. |
|---|
Web Browsers
The purpose of a web browser (Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari) is to read HTML documents and display them.
The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses them to determine how to display the document:
HTML Page Structure
Below is a visualization of an HTML page structure:
<html>
<head>
<title>Page title</title>
</head>
<body>
</html>
<h1>This is a heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph.</p>
</body> | Only the <body> area (the white area) is displayed by the browser. |
|---|
The <!DOCTYPE> Declaration
The <!DOCTYPE> declaration helps the browser to display a web page correctly.
There are different document types on the web.
To display a document correctly, the browser must know both type and version.
The doctype declaration is not case sensitive. All cases are acceptable:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<!doctype html>
<!Doctype Html>
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<!doctype html>
<!Doctype Html>
Common Declarations
HTML5
<!DOCTYPE html>
HTML 4.01
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
"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">
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
| All tutorials and examples at W3Schools use HTML5. |
|---|
HTML Versions
Since the early days of the web, there have been many versions of HTML:
| Version | Year |
|---|---|
| HTML | 1991 |
| HTML 2.0 | 1995 |
| HTML 3.2 | 1997 |
| HTML 4.01 | 1999 |
| XHTML | 2000 |
| HTML5 | 2012 |
Windows: Try Notepad++
Programmers love text editors, so they keep making new ones. There are hundreds of free text editors out there, not to mention the ones you could pay for.However, I'll make this easy. If you're on Windows, try Notepad++. Notepad++ is free and open source, and it's very easy.
Just save a new file with an .html extension, and Notepad++ will turn on syntax highlighting.
You can always try a different editor later. You almost certainly will. But Notepad++ will get you started.
Download Notepad++.
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