HTML Introduction

What is HTML?

HTML is a language for describing web pages.

• HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
• HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language
• A markup language is a set of markup tags
• HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages

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HTML Tags

HTML markup tags are usually called HTML tags

• HTML tags are keywords surrounded by angle brackets like
• HTML tags normally come in pairs like and
• The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
• Start and end tags are also called opening tags and closing tags

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HTML Documents = Web Pages

• HTML documents describe web pages
• HTML documents contain HTML tags and plain text
• HTML documents are also called web pages

The purpose of a web browser (like Internet Explorer or Firefox) is to read HTML documents and display them as web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page:

My First Heading My first paragraph

Example Explained

• The text between and describes the web page
• The text between and is the visible page content
• The text between

  and

  is displayed as a heading
• The text between and
  is displayed as a paragraph