Just to preface that this particular blog post is here to help me understand a bit more about the markup language I am currently using – HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. This is more of a brief and simplistic overview of HTML that may be beneficial for beginners who have never used HTML before and would like a very brief introduction.

First and foremost though – we have Sir Tim Berners-Lee to thank for this programme as it is the foundational language of the World Wide Web.

The development of HTML went through a few developments before it was readily available to the public through open licence in the mid-90s. Berners-Lee initially created the markup language to create a way to transmit electronic documents between scientist from all over the world. However opening the markup language to everyone has enabled WWW to be the wonder that we know it today. As well as being the World Wide Web’s main markup language, HTML is one of the most used markup languages for the development of web pages and web design…but…

What is a markup language?

Well… a markup language in terms of web development is a computer language that creates web documents also known as web pages. However, when using HTML, we have to remember that it provides a basic layout of the webpage, that can be styled by Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS helps to enhance the appearance of the webpage by describing what each HTML element must contain. (As this post is focusing on HTML we won’t go into CSS.)

Ok… well what is a HTML element?

So glad you asked and many thanks for your active participation! Here:

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<h1>Chocolate Brownies Cake</h1>

is one of the simpler elements illustrating the first heading of the document titled Chocolate Brownie Cake.

  • A HTML element is the component of the language that normally deals with the formatting of the page and it consists of tags.
  • Most tags are contained in less than and greater than brackets (<>)
  • Most HTML tags have an opening tag containing the tag name (e.g. h1)
  • Tag attributes (Chocolate Brownie Cake) – which are between the start and end tag are affected by the tag or displayed on the web page because of the tag
  • A closing tag containing a forward slash (</), ending with the tag name being closed (</h1>)
A few tags you will become familiar with:
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<body> </body> refers to the body of the webpage

<h1> </h1> refers to the (first) heading

<html> </html> is the root tag which defines the whole html document

<p> </p> refers to the paragraph

Random fact: Some people when referring to HTML may say/type: ‘an’ HTML tag or ‘a’ HTML tag for example and this all depends on how you pronounce the letter ‘h’ in HTML. So if it’s a vowel sound (aitch) then they use ‘an’ but if haitch they use ‘a’. Think about how we say ‘half an hour’ and ‘hey look…a house’!

Thanks for reading!