What Is HTML?

September 1, 2020 at 7:04 am By

Before we read about ‘What is HTML?’, let us see how it came into being.

Development Of HTML

It has been 30 years since the first website was created. In 1990, in a small office at CERN, Tim-Berner’s Lee envisaged the idea of linking documents and getting them onto public networks. Since that day, HTML has evolved continuously.

HTML is an acronym of ‘Hypertext Markup Language”. It is not a programming language. Rather, it is used to format text documents. Similarly, ‘ Hypertext’ is any text that links web pages. Thus, HTML is a language that links formatted and interactive web pages.

Now that we have a little idea about ‘What Is HTML?’, let us know more about how it has evolved:

Evolution Of HTML

The first version of HTML, HTML 1.0, was released in 1991. Subsequently, multiple versions of HTML have been created and used. Currently, HTML5, the 5th version of HTML, is used extensively to build modern web pages and web apps. “

According to an HTML5 tutorial blog, “HTML5 has brought some exciting new advantages to the HTML coding world. Canvas allows you to render graphics powered by Javascript.”

” The Web Platform Working Group continues the development of the HTML language and provides specifications that enable improved client-side application development on the Web.”, says W3C.

What Is HTML Used For

HTML, when used with CSS and Javascript, has become a key element of website development. CSS standardizes web layouts by describing how HTML elements will be displayed. On the other hand, Javascript is responsible for the way the content behaves. Learn more about CSS and Javascript in these blogs!

Along with building dynamic web pages, HTML is also used to link these web pages. This is where Hypertext comes into play. Using Hypertext, one can navigate from one web page to another. Thus, HTML can be used to create user flows.

Let us now look at an example of a simple webpage using HTML. In this example, we will create a paragraph with the heading ‘What is HTML?’.

First Example Of HTML

<html>  
    <head>  
       <title> HyperText Markup Language </title>  
    </head>  
    <body>  
       <h1>  What is HTML </h1>  
       <p>
           What is HTML? HTML is an acronym of ‘Hypertext Markup Language”. 
       </p>  
    </body>  
</html>  

As you can see, HTML uses angular brackets ‘<’ & ‘>’ to differentiate the annotations from regular text. This is an extension of a previous language, SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language). It tells the browser that the next string is a markup.

Components Of HTML

Anything between the angular brackets is known as a tag. For example, <head>, <body>, <p> are all tags.

Similarly, starting tag(eg. <head>), ending tag (eg. </head>), and everything in between is together known as an element. Here, header, body, paragraph are all elements which are pieces in itself.

Another important component of HTML is attributes. Attributes are additional characteristics and are always mentioned in starting tag. For example,

<p id= “para-1” class= “learning-HTML”> Ceres is an ocean planet </p>

The ‘id’ and ‘class’ are the attributes used to uniquely identify with “para-1” and is a part of a class “learning-HTML”.

The statement used in between tags is not going to affect the attributes. Elements, Tags & Attributes are the important constituents of HTML which makes the modern web pages shine.

Understanding The Example

<html> tag tells the browser that this an HTML document. It contains web content in between.

<head> tag is used before the <body>. This tag mentions information about the document.

<body> tag contains the main body of the web page.

<p> tag is used to write paragraphs in a web document and <h1> tag is used to write a heading.

Similarly, you can also add an image to your webpage using the below code.

<img src="C/inserthtml.jpeg" alt="What is HTML?">

This tag contains two attributes: src which specifies the source of the image and alt which provides an alternate text to describe the image.

Last but not the least, let us take a look at the main functionality of HTML i.e. linking webpages. A hyperlink is used to navigate between websites. I’m sure you would have seen sentences like ‘Find more blogs here‘. Try clicking the link above. It will take you to one of the articles on this website. A hyperlink can work on both texts as well as images.

Conclusion

In this blog, we learned ‘What is Html?’. HTML is the most popular markup language to build websites today. You can learn more about it in our posts here!