What is HTML?
- HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
- HTML is the standard markup language for creating Web pages
- HTML describes the structure of a Web page
- HTML consists of a series of elements
- HTML elements tell the browser how to display the content
- HTML elements label pieces of content such as "this is a heading", "this is a paragraph", "this is a link", etc.
A Simple HTML Document
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
HTML History
Since the early days of the World Wide Web, there have been many versions of HTML:
Year Version
1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented www
1991 Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML
1993 Dave Raggett drafted HTML+
1995 HTML Working Group defined HTML 2.0
1997 W3C Recommendation: HTML 3.2
1999 W3C Recommendation: HTML 4.01
2000 W3C Recommendation: XHTML 1.0
2008 WHATWG HTML5 First Public Draft
2012 WHATWG HTML5 Living Standard
2014 W3C Recommendation: HTML5
2016 W3C Candidate Recommendation: HTML 5.1
2017 W3C Recommendation: HTML5.1 2nd Edition
2017 W3C Recommendation: HTML5.2
Basic HTML Document
Below mentioned are the basic HTML tags that divide the whole document into various parts like head, body, etc.
Every HTML document begins with a HTML document tag. Although this is not mandatory, it is a good convention to start the document with this below-mentioned tag. Please refer to the HTML Doctypes article for more information related to Doctypes.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html> : Every HTML code must be enclosed between basic HTML tags. It begins with <html> and ends with </html> tag.
<head>: The head tag comes next which contains all the header information of the web page or documents like the title of the page and other miscellaneous information. This information is enclosed within the head tag which opens with <head> and ends with </head>. The contents will of this tag will be explained in the later sections of the course.
<title>: We can mention the title of a web page using the <title> tag. This is header information and hence is mentioned within the header tags. The tag begins with <title> and ends with </title>.
<body>: Next step is the most important of all the tags we have learned so far. The body tag contains the actual body of the page which will be visible to all the users. This opens with <body> and ends with </body>. All content enclosed within this tag will be shown on the web page be it writings or images or audio or videos or even links. We will see later in the section how using various tags we may insert mentioned contents into our web pages.
The whole pattern of the code will look something like the below code example.
Example: This example illustrates the HTML basic structure.
<html>
<head>
<!-- Information about the page -->
<!--This is the comment tag-->
<title>GeeksforGeeks</title>
</head>
<body>
<!--Contents of the webpage-->
</body>
</html>