
How I Would Explain HTML To A Friend
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It’s the language that all websites are written in. Therefore if you want to know how to code websites, HTML is where to start. Of course learning JavaScript, another language, afterwards will be very useful in combination with HTML because they are good for web design.
HTML uses brackets that look like this <>. Within the brackets are your commands, also known as elements. For instance the ‘h1’ element makes text on your website large like a header. Here’s how an h1 element would be coded:
<h1>(Header Text)</h1>
By doing this the text in between the two elements becomes larger. Also, the second element is called a closing element. To tell the computer it’s a closing element you need to put a ‘/’ in the second bracket. So most html tags follow a pattern of <> then </>.
All HTML documents need to start with you telling it what language you’re using. To do this you type <!DOCTYPE html>. Then your entire code needs to be put in between two <html> </html> brackets.
Websites always have a head: <head> </head>. Within these two brackets is all the data you don’t see on the website. Things like its title, and meta data which helps search engines find your website.
After the </head> finally comes the <body></body> tags.This is where all the content of the website goes such as the header I mentioned earlier. Other commands used in the body include <p></p> which tells your computer that the text in between those two brackets are a new paragraph.
Some HTML tags don’t need a closer such as the <hr> command, which puts a horizontal rule on your website.
HTML also allows for the putting of links and images. Use the <a href=”(insert URL here)”> (Link name here) </a> command to put down links on your website. <img src=”(Image URL}”> puts down an image on your website.
The very beginning of a website looks something like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
The language, HTML is declared and both the head and body are typed out.
Thus concludes how I would explain HTML to a friend.