Introduction to HTML

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is used to design web pages using markup language.

HTML is the combination of Hypertext and Markup language.

  • Hypertext defines the link between the web pages.
  • Markup language is used to define the text document within tag which defines the structure of web pages.

It is noteworthy that HTML is not a programming language, but rather a markup language. Let us find a dividing line between these types of language:

  • A markup language is used to control the presentation of data, like “represent these user names as a bullet list or as a table”.
  • A programming language is used to transform data. It does so by creating CPU instructions that rewrite the input data into the output; hopefully, the desired output.

Most of markup languages are human readable. Language uses tags to define what manipulation has to be done on the text. HTML is a markup language which is used by the browser to manipulate text, images and other content to display it in required format.

Short History

HTML was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. The first ever version of HTML was HTML 1.0 but the first standard version was HTML 2.0 which was published in 1999.

HTML VersionYear
HTML 1.01991
HTML 2.01995
HTML 3.21997
HTML 4.011999
XHTML2000
HTML52014

HTML Breakdown

The HTML document can be divided into two sections:

Head Section: The <head> element is a container for all the head elements. <title> (this element is required in an HTML document), <style>, <base>, <link>, <meta>, <script> and <noscript> tag can go inside the <head>

Body Section: The body of HTML document contains the text that is displayed on a web page. The body section is enclosed within <body> tag. It gives a description of the document layout and structure.

HTML Example

below example will demonstrate the basic architecture of HTML Document

Copy Code 


<!doctype html>
<html>
            <head> 
                        <title>My First HTML Page</title> 
             </head>
             <body> 
                         <p>HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language</p>
             </body>
</html>