What is HTML? [Why You Should Learn This Language?]
HTML is a starting step to building your career in the web development & designing field. You must start learning this language to understand the basic website concepts to become a great web developer or designer.
What is HTML Language?
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is used for creating web pages and web applications. Let's understand the terms Hyper Text Markup Language & Web Pages.
Hyper Text: Text with a clickable link is known as Hyper Text. It means when you add a link in a text through an anchor tag, a new webpage will open in a separate browser tab. You can link two or more web pages through Hyper Text easily.
Hyper Text is useful for SEOs and website owners to do interlinking of web pages to boost the website page authority.
Markup Language: Markup Language is a computer language that is used for structuring and formatting text documents using predefined symbols & tags.
You can make a text document more interactive and dynamic through a markup language. It can convert text into the form of tables, links, images, etc.
A markup language has a strict syntax and is more readable than programming languages (C, Python, etc). A markup language syntax is easy to understand for both computers and humans while programming language syntax is designed only for computers.
Web Page: A web page is a hypertext document on the World Wide Web which is commonly written in Hyper Text Markup Language and translated by a web browser. You can search a web page on the internet by entering the URL in the browser’s address bar.
A web page can be of two types:- dynamic or static. We can create only static web pages in Hyper Text Markup Language.
Hence we can create attractive web pages via styling in HTML and they look in a nice format on a web browser. HTML document consists many HTML tags and each tag contains different content.
Let’s see a Basic Example of an HTML Program
<!DOCTYPE html><html><head>
<title>Title of a WebPage Will Display in Browser's Title Bar</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Main Heading of This Web Page.</h1>
<p>This is the First Paragraph of a Web Page.</p>
<p>This is the Second Paragraph of a Web Page.</p>
</body></html>
Basic HTML Example Explanation
In this basic HTML program, we have used different HTML elements, which are;
- <!DOCTYPE html> : The <!DOCTYPE html> declaration instructs the web browser that document is using HTML 5 version.
- <html> : The <html> element is the core element of an HTML Page, it informs the web browser that the document is written in HTML. The text between html tag contains information of a web document and it is a container for all other elements excluding <!DOCTYPE html>.
- <head>: The head tag should be the first element inside the <html> element which contains the meta data (document title, character set, scripting, linking, and meta description) of a web document. A head tag must be closed before body tag starts.
- <title>: A <title> element is used to add the title in a HTML page which appears on the top of a web browser. Title tag must be present inside the <head> element and it should be closed immediately.
- <body>: The <body> element defines the document’s body and contains all the visible contents (headings, images, links, paragraphs, etc) inside the body tag.
- <h1> : The text inside <h1> element defines the larger heading or first level of heading in a web document.
- <p>: The text inside <p> element describes the paragraph of a web document.
What is a Web Browser?
A Web Browser is an application software for accessing the information on the World Wide Web. While in HTML, you can view your HTML document/program output on a browser.
You can view your HTML document or program on various browsers such as Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc. A browser does not show the HTML tags, but shows the program output like this;
HTML Page Structure
Note: The Content inside the body section is displayed in the browser as an output while the title content is shown in the browser’s top bar.
History of HTML Language
The main purpose of inventing HTML is to share scientific information with CERN researchers in the form of hypertext documents. In 1989, Tim Berners Lee, a software engineer, who was a contractor at CERN, invented WWW (World Wide Web).
After developing World Wide Web (WWW), Tim Berners Lee invented HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) in 1991. He created a document which is known as HTML tags. HTML 5 is the latest version of HTML which we will discuss in the upcoming tutorials.
HTML Versions List
There are different HTML versions are available in the market since HTML was invented. These versions are given below;
HTML 1.0: Tim Berners Lee invented HTML in 1991, where he developed the document in the form of HTML Tags. But the first version of HTML 1.0 was released in 1993.
HTML 2.0: The first HTML version (HTML 1.0) does not have many features. In 1995, HTML 2.0 was released which has more features than HTML 1.0.
Concepts of Forms and Tables have taken place in the second HTML version. You can now add text boxes and buttons in the Forms.
W3C has founded during HTML 2.0 to maintain standards across different web browsers for rendering HTML tags similarly on every browser.
HTML 3.2: W3C standard maintenance was the main reason for named HTML 3.2 instead of HTML 3. HTML 3.2 was introduced in 1997, where HTML tags were improved and better support was available for new Form elements.
Now HTML 3.2 was integrated with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to make HTML tags look better. After HTML 3.2, browsers were upgraded to support the frame tags but the frame markup tag was not supported yet.
HTML 4.01: HTML 4.01 was introduced in 1999 which has extended support for Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). In HTML 3.2 version, for applying style on each webpage, we had to place CSS on each webpage which causes the same CSS block repetition.
To resolve this problem, the External Style Sheet concept was developed in HTML 4.01, where we wrote CSS syntax in an External Style Sheet & link this style sheet to HTML via a tag.
HTML 4.01 was a stable version of HTML which had extended support for further new tags.
HTML 5: First published draft of HTML 5 was launched in 2008, but HTML 5 was ready to use for a developer in 2014. It is the advanced version of HTML which supports additional tags such as email, password, audio, semantic, and section tags.
Advantages & Disadvantages of HTML
HTML has lots of advantages and disadvantages. So let’s discuss them.
Advantages:
- It is a simple language, everybody can easily learn and use HTML.
- It is a widely used language that is supported by every browser.
- It supports the linking of web pages through hypertext which helps a user to navigate from one webpage to another.
- It provides offline support. When you open an HTML webpage online, it is available offline on a web browser without any internet.
- It has native support for game development.
- It supports web designing and web development.
- It is easy to make an effective presentation in HTML and now you can also add graphics, video, and audio to your webpage.
- It is free and no need to buy software for learning HTML.
- It allows template utilization for making web page designing easy.
- It has fast loading due to its lightweight.
Disadvantages:
- You can’t design dynamic pages because HTML is a static language.
- Security is Less.
- You have to write a lot of code for a simple program. Sometimes long code can become complex for creating a web page in HTML.
- It consumes a lot of time to create forms, tables, lists, and coloring for a web page.
- Sometimes deprecated tags can create problems for you. Use these tags carefully with other languages.
Why Learning HTML Is So Important?
The main intent behind developing HTML is to share secret scientific information in the form of hypertext documents with the CERN researchers. But HTML has gained immense popularity and over a period of time, it had been used too much in the web designing and development field because of the wide range of HTML Tags.
HTML is a must language for those working professionals or students who want to make their career in the software field, especially in the web designing and development area. Here we are mentioning key benefits to learn the HTML language;
- You can create or customize your website template easily.
- Understanding other programming languages such as PHP, JavaScript, etc is easy after learning HTML.
- You can optimize your website speed and performance for the best user experience.
- Learning HTML is important to becoming a web designer or web developer.
- HTML is easy to learn and implement.
- HTML is also a necessary skill in SEO for optimizing the anchor tags and internal linking.
Basic Requirements for Learning HTML
Before learning HTML, you must have a basic knowledge of working with;
- Windows, Linux, or Mac Operating System.
- Notepad, Notepad++, or any text editor.
- You must have knowledge of how to create & operate directories on a computer.
- Basic understanding of Image Formats like JPEG, PNG, etc, and how to write or save content in a computer file.
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