What is HTML in Simple Terms?

What is HTML?

HTML is the short form of “Hyper Text Markup Language”. It is the set of symbols that insets in a file intended for displaying in web browser. It indicates web browser how to display contents (text, image etc) for the user. So it’s a markup language not programming language.

Every web page is a markup file and it’s impossible to design a website without using markup language. Every html file ends with .html file extension and is made up of many  tags as well as the content for web page.

HTML Tags

Tags are the hidden keyword in a web page that indicates how the browser will format the web contents.

Most tags have two parts opening part and closing part.

< tagname >

</tagname >

In this example < tagname > is a opening tag and </ tagname > is the ending or closing tag. Opening and closing tag contains the same text inside. The main difference between the two tags is that closing tag has a extra forward-slash (/) character.

There are some tags that are exception where closing tag is not required. <img> that that is used to show image in the browser is the best example of single tag.

 

A small example:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>

<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>

</body>
</html>

 

HTML is not case sensitive. If we write <BODY>content</BODY> that will work perfectly same as shows in <body></body>. But now a days most of the web developers are using lowercase to writing markup. So <html> is standard for writing markup.

The latest version HTML5 has added many features for the user. In the latest version html added:

  •  Geolocation
  • Drag and Drop
  •  Local Storage
  • Application Cache
  • Web Workers
  • SSE

Also in the new version some tag element has been removed and some new elements has been added.

 

In the next post we will discuss on html elements.