HTML basics

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language in which most websites are written. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. It is used to describe the content of a document so it can be read by browsers in the internet or offline.

Hypertext: How web pages are connected to one another, either within a single website or between websites? By using links. These are a fundamental aspect of the Web. Content linking is the building block of Internet’s purpose: sharing information.
Markup: to annotate text, images, and other content for display in a Web browser. HTML markup includes special “elements” called tags, such as <head>, <title>, <body>, and many others.
Tags: HTML element surrounded by “<” and “>”.

is HTML a programming language?

HTML is a way of adding context and structure to text, therefore some people don’t consider it a programming language, because “a programming language is a notation for writing programs, which are specifications of a computation or algorithm” When you code HTML, you’re denoting a piece of data, You haven’t “instructed” the browser to execute a task.

How to write HTML Tags

HTML Tag Structure

The main parts of our element are as follows:

The opening tag: This consists of the name of the element (in this case, p), wrapped in opening and closing angle brackets. This states where the element begins or starts to take effect — in this case where the paragraph begins.
The closing tag: This is the same as the opening tag, except that it includes a forward slash before the element name. This states where the element ends — in this case where the paragraph ends. Failing to add a closing tag is one of the standard beginner errors and can lead to strange results.
The content: This is the content of the element, which in this case, is just text.
The element: The opening tag, the closing tag and the content together comprise the element.

Besides from the previous parts, Tags can have attributes that contain more information about the content, they usually won’t be visible in the document:

HTML Tag attributes

An attribute should always have the following:

A space between it and the element name (or the previous attribute, if the element already has one or more attributes).
The attribute name followed by an equal sign.
The attribute value wrapped by opening and closing quotation marks.

HTML tag can contain other tags and this called Nesting.

<p>My cat is <strong>very</strong> grumpy.</p>

Some HTML tags like <img> can be empty and not contain other tags. They usually are self enclosed (They don’t need the closing tag) as well:

<img src="images/firefox-icon.png" alt="My test image">

Source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web/HTML_basics

Basic HTML file structure

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0">
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>My HTML page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>This is my HTML page</p>
  </body>
</html>

It should always start with <!DOCTYPE html>
Like Human body it should have a <head> and <body>. What’s in the <head> it won’t be visible to the user, but it will what’s inside the <body>.
<meta> is used to define the character encoding for the HTML document.
Without a <title>, users will never know what’s your page about.
<p> is used to display paragraphs.
Most of content tags should be closed with a backslash </head>,</body>,</html>.

Exercise

Create an HTML document and see it live in your browser.

Inside your fork html-tutorial repo, under the 1-the-basics folder, create a file named basic.html Don’t forget to include the .html extension
Copy the contents of the HTML file structure from above into the html file
Put your name inside the <title> and in the <p> tags
Save your changes and double click your file
Your file should be visible in the browser and look similar to this image:
Push the changes to your local copy of the repo.

HTML structure exercise