The HTML code is the foundation of every web page. We tell browsers how to structure content into paragraphs, headings, images, links, lists, forms, tables, and buttons. Learn HTML if you’re interested in building a website, web development, or just coding in general.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends HTML, which is generally adhered to by all major web browsers, including desktop and mobile browsers. Currently, HTML5 is the most recent version.
What is HTML
HTML stands for “Hypertext Markup Language” and is used to build, structure and design websites. Hypertext refers to HTML’s ability to link out to relevant content. In HTML, tags define a webpage’s layout and overall structure, as well as the content elements within it.
HTML tags tell your web browser what to display on the screen and in what order – before any styling or dynamic elements are added. When you code for the web, you wrap or enclose different parts of your content in order to ensure that it appears where, when, and how you want it to. A basic HTML tag can control font size and formatting options such as bolding or italicizing.
HTML has remained the fundamental framework that powers web design despite the fact that content, design, and dynamism have changed dramatically over the past few decades. Dynamic websites generated by advanced scripting languages such as Javascript or PHP use HTML at least in part. Because of this, HTML continues to be an essential skill for web developers.
HTML: How it works
HTML is a text file with specific syntax, file and naming conventions that indicate to the computer and web server that it is HTML. Using HTML conventions in virtually any text editor, a user can design a basic webpage, upload it to the internet, and then write and edit it.
HTML conventions require a document type declaration at the beginning of a text file. As the first piece in the document, it affirmatively tells a computer that this is an HTML file. The document header typically looks like this: <!DOCTYPE html>. You should always write it that way, without any content inside it or breaking it up. The computer will not recognize any content before this declaration as HTML.
It is not only HTML that uses Doctypes, but any document that uses SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) as well. The SGML standard specifies a specific markup language. A number of markup languages are covered by SGML and doctype declarations, including HTML. An HTML file must also be saved with a .html extension. The doctype declaration identifies HTML inside the file, whereas the file extension identifies HTML outside the file. Computers can identify HTML files by having both, regardless of whether they are reading them or not. When uploading files to the web, the web server must know what to do with them before it can deliver them to a client computer for reading.
By writing the doctype and saving the HTML file, a user can use all the syntactic tools of HTML to customize a web page. After finishing, they will likely have several HTML files corresponding to different pages of the website. Users should upload these files in the same order that they saved them, since each page references the specific file paths of the other pages, enabling links between them. Due to the differences in the file paths, uploading them in a different order will cause links to break and pages to be lost.
HTML Editors
The HTML editor is a software tool that helps you create HTML code. As with text editors such as Notepad and TextEdit, HTML editors allow users to enter raw text. A HTML editor is used by most (if not all) professional web developers to create and maintain their websites. A good HTML editor can greatly increase productivity.
On the market, there are many options. The following are a few of the most popular HTML editors:
- Notepad ++
- Sublime Text 3
- Komodo Edit
History Of HTML
Marking up text-based documents using HTML syntax was sufficient to facilitate the sharing of academic documents and technical memos in the early days of the internet. Despite this, as the internet expanded beyond academia into the homes of the general population, webpages became more interactive and formatted.
HTML 4.01 was released in 1999, when the internet was still a relatively new concept, and HTML5 was not standardized until 2014. During this time, HTML markup moved from simply describing the document structure of webpage content to also describing how it should appear on a webpage.
Because of this, HTML4-based webpages often included information about what font to use, what color to use for the background, and how to align content. An HTML antipattern is describing how an HTML element should be rendered within an HTML tag. Structure of content should be described in HTML, not its styling and rendering within a browser. Markup languages other than HTML are better suited for this purpose.
Final thoughts
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Likewise, HTML uses basic English as its language of instruction. The display of non-English characters — or letters — such as Chinese, or special symbols — like letters with accent marks — may not be correct on a website by default. For special character sets, users need to specify the character encoding with an element like this: <meta charset=”utf-8″/>. This case uses utf-8 as the character set. HTML uses UTF-8 as its default charset for English.
Thanks for reading this article about HTML and what it does. I hope it helped you learn a little more about it. You can now learn more advanced technologies, such as CSS and JavaScript, and start building a solid career in web development.