What the heck is HTML?
This is the information age, powered by the internet. And HTML is what powers this information exchange.
At the dusk of the previous century, less than a decade to the millennium; a single man named Tim Berners-Lee had the brilliant idea of a world wide web. The concepts of computer networks were already in place, he got them all together to create the first website at CERN. He designed and built the first web browser and the first web server, CERN HTTPd.
The whole point of creating the world wide web was to facilitate information exchange (primarily between scientists at CERN), to connect different entities to each other only separated by a computer screen.
The transfer of data had been taken care of by the networks. All we need now was a way to format the data so that anyone can comprehend the data. Thus HTML was born.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.
Okay, lets break it down.
Hypertext is defined as the text displayed on a computer screen or any electronic devices containing links to other text documents.
Markup Language is a syntax to structure a textual document to add information about the data in the text. (or if you may — metadata)
So, for example, how do you embed in a document that certain part of the text should be displayed in bold. In comes HTML. We format the data in such a way that it includes the information about the bold-ness of a text.
And that format is — <b>This is some bold text.</b>
The browser is a specifically designed piece of software which understands this language and interprets it. It shows the user bold text rather than <b>bold text</b>.
The fundamental units of this language are tags. “<b>” is a tag, its a bold tag, and “</b>” is the corresponding end tag. Each tag is terminated using a corresponding end tag, enclosing in the data to be formatted according to the specific tag. This format also allows for nesting other tags inside it (that’s actually the true strength of HTML).
The most import tags are html, head and body. Each html document should have these to exploit the full potential of a web browser. It is structured as follows.
We have only seen the bold tag till now. So what else can we do with this?
Well you already know that; each and every website out there uses HTML to serve its content to the user. All the stuff you see out there on the world wide web is powered by this language (and other tools).
The bottom line: HTML is basis of all websites today and learning it is a piece of cake.
What next?
- FreeCodeCamp, the best way to start learning the web.
- W3Schools is regarded as the foremost tutorial for web technologies. (Debatable)
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