HTML — Basic Concepts

What is HTML?

HTML is the abbreviation of “HyperText Markup Language”. One could describe “Markup Language” as a series of markups which tells the web server a document’s structure and style, and “HyperText” as a text used to reference other texts. Among the most common uses of HTML, are:

• Webdevelopment: design how a browser will display elements in a page like text, hyperlinks and media files.
• Navigation: users can navigate and insert links in related pages and websites; it is widely used to incorporate hyperlinks.
• Documentation: document organization and formatting.

How HTML works

Since it’s not a programming language, but a markup language, HTML is used to create the structure of a web page content. The browser interprets the HTML file and renders its content so that the users can see it, based on its structure.

While making use of HTML, one could set the type of information that is going to be rendered, or even its appearance through the usage of elements and tags.

Structure of a HTML element

Let’s use the following case as an example to analyze its structure:

<p>Hello World!</p>

A HTML element contains:

• Opening tag: Name of the element (in our example, the tag is p) surrounded by angle brackets.
• Content: The element’s content, which in out example is the text line “Hello World!”.
• Closing tag: The same as the opening tag, but with a slash before the element’s name, telling the browser where the element ends.

HTML elements can also have attributes, which are extra information that will not be printed as part of the content. Attributes can serve to indicate id, classes, as displayed in the example below:

<p class=”text”>Hello World!</p>

In this case, we are indicating that this element will receive the styles from the “text” class.

Conclusion

With this, we have the basic knowledge of what is and how a HTML document works. Its elements, attributes, tags, and general structure.