An introduction to HTML

The backbone of every website, HTML is a markup language, which means you’ll be describing, or marking, your content for the computers to differentiate your content. Look at the following example:

This is my title
And this is some body text with a link to http://codesandnotes.com.

Here the computer has no way of recognizing what type of content it is. It’s just text and that’s where HTML comes in:

<h1>This is my title</h1>
<p>And this is some body text with a link to <a href="http://codesandnotes.com">Codes &amp; Notes</a>.</p>

Now it makes sense, not only to computers, but to you and the people using your site because browsers will apply default styling and functionality to the elements, now that it recognizes them.

You’ll get a lot of things for free by using the right elements. HTML is HTML elements and elements consist of tags, attributes and content. To avoid any further confusion, please read HTML tags vs. elements vs. attributes now. Yes, now. I’ll wait.

HTML provide semantics for your content and provide hooks for further enhancing your content with CSS and JavaScript, or styling and functionality, respectively.

But where does HTML come from?

The vocabulary and syntax of HTML are defined in specifications (specs) by the W3C and WHATWG. Two open groups that discuss, maintain and develop the HTML standard closely together. You can go to their websites to read the specs, the real nitty gritty of how everything works.

More to write about

  • doctype
  • elements, semantics & accessibility
  • Apply tags to HTML document to effectively section content
  • Differentiate between the various image file types
  • Predict image path and apply relative paths to img src tags
  • Discuss how the Internet delivers web pages to the browser
  • Get comfortable with the basic HTML elements
  • Apply HTML tags: <head>, <link>, <script>, <style>, <meta> to web pages
  • Apply tags to HTML document to effectively section content
  • Differentiate between the various image file types
  • Predict image path and apply relative paths to img src tags
  • Discuss how the Internet delivers web pages to the browser

Chained or prefixed classes? ☞