HTML
Developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language. HTML is used to create electronic documents (called pages) that are displayed on the World Wide Web. Each page contains a series of connections to other pages called hyperlinks. Every web page you see on the Internet is written using one version of HTML code or another.
HTML code ensures proper formatting of text and images by enabling your Internet browser to interpret them properly. Without HTML, a browser would not know how to display text as elements or bring load images. HTML also provides a basic structure of the page, upon which Cascading Style Sheets are overlaid to change its appearance. One could think of HTML as the bones of a web page, and CSS as the aesthetics or skin.
What does HTML look like?
The following is an example of a basic web page written in HTML as well as a description of each section and its function.
<!DOCType HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en"><head>
<title>Example page</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a heading</h1>
<p>This is an example of a basic HTML page.</p>
</body></html>
The
box above contains the key ingredients to a basic web page. The first
line (DOCType) describes what version of HTML the page was written in so
that an Internet browser can interpret the text that follows. Next,
the HTML opening tag lets the browser know that it is reading HTML code. The HTML tag is followed by the head section which contains information about the page such as its title, meta tags, and where to locate the CSS file. The body
section is all content that is viewable on the browser. For example,
all the text you see here is contained within the body tags. Finally,
closing tags wrap each element for proper syntax.
What is HTML5?
HTML5 is the update made to HTML from HTML4 (XHTML
follows a different version numbering scheme). It uses the same basic
rules as HTML4, but adds some new tags and attributes which allow for
better semantics and for dynamic elements that are activated using JavaScript.
New elements include section, article, aside, header, hgroup, footer,
nav, figure, figcaption, video, audio, track, embed (different usage),
mark, progress, meter, time, ruby, rt, rp, bdi, wbr, canvas, command,
details, datalist, keygen, and output. There are new input types for forms, which include tel, search, url, email, datetime, date, month, week, time, datetime-local, number, range, and color.
With
the increasing movement to keep structure and style separate, a number
of styling elements have been removed along with those that had
accessibility issues or saw very little use. These following elements
should no longer be used in HTML code: basefont, big, center, font,
strike, tt, frame, frameset, noframes, acronym, applet, isindex, and
dir. HTML5 also simplifies the doctype declaration
What is the simplest HTML page?
Always type a title between the <TITLE> and
</TITLE> tags. This title will appear at the top of
the browser display.
Your page contents go between the <BODY> and
</BODY> tags.
You can type this code in any text editor or word
processor, and if you save it as plain text with a file
suffix of .html (example: mypage.html), you can view it
with a browser.
After you have created a simple page using a text editor,
you should consider getting a better HTML editor. There are
lots of them. I even wrote one — it is called
