What is it?
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, which is the standard markup language used in Web Development. It describes the entire structure of a web page, down to all present elements, while CSS defines the visual style. In other words, it describes what is presented, not how.
Creating HTML files
To create a HTML file, one needs only to create a text file with the .html extension. This way, other software can recognize the text is, in fact, HTML.
While HTML is most commonly used to create websites, it can also be applied to different use-cases, like building custom e-mails and formatting text. To achieve all that, HTML uses tags and to define elements
Tags and elements
Tags are instructions that define the structure and meaning of an element, providing semantic meaning and readability to define different elements.
Elements are the result of interpreting a tag. By writing tags, we can define elements, which the browser will show the structure to the user.
An element is defined by using an opening tag, the closing tag and the element content in between the tags. Tags are opened with < > and closed with </ >. An arbitrary example would be:
<element_name> element_content </element_name>Forget the closing tags with void elements
There are some elements that don’t have closing tags or any content. These are the void elements. They include
<img>,<meta>,<link>and<input>.
Creating a simple web page
A minimal template to create the structure of a web page using HTML:
<!-- Specifying the browser interpreter that this code is HTML -->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<!-- The head element define metadata, like the enconding and title -->
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<!-- This is the window upper title, in the browser tabs -->
<title>My page title</title>
</head>
<!-- Everything the user sees is inside the body element-->
<body>
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
<p>This is a simple paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>