html

HyperText Markup Language: the language of web pages

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is way of “marking up text” to indicate how should be structured into a web page.

For example, suppose we want a web page to look like this:

Demo Web Page

Hello, World

Welcome to my web page. This web page is a demonstration of HTML.

The HTML code might look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
 <head><title>Example web page</title></head>
 <body>
   <h1>Hello, World</h1>
   <p>
     Welcome to my web page.  This
     web page is a demonstration of
     HTML.
   </p>
 </body>
</html>

Notice a few things:

There are words enclosed in less-than and greater-than signs, such as <html>, <h1> and <p>. Those are called tags.
There are slashes in front of some of them, and not others.
The ones without slashes (e.g. <h1> and <p>) are called open tags and the ones with the slashes (e.g. </h1> and </p>) are called close tags.
In this context, we sometimes call these less-than and greater-than signs angle brackets.
Most open tags are followed by a matching close tag; e.g. if you see a <p>, it should befollowed eventually by a </p>

Elements

An HTML element consists of an open tag, content and a close tag. The element is named for its open tag.

For example, this is one HTML element, a p element:

<p> HTML was first proposed in 1980 by
a physicist named Tim Berners-Lee.</p>

And this is another HTML element, an h1 element.

<h1>HTML Basics</h1>

The content of this element is the text HTML Basics.