Introduction to Markup

In this article, we will cover the absolute basics of HTML. To get you started, this article defines the elements, attributes, and all the other important terms you may have heard. It also explains where these fit into HTML.

You will learn how HTML elements are structured, how a typical HTML page is structured, and other important basic language features. Along the way, there will be an opportunity to play with HTML too!

What is HTML?

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a markup language that tells web browsers how to structure the web pages you visit. It can be complicated or as simple as the web developer wants it to be.

HTML consists of a series of elements, which you use to encode, wrap, or mark up different parts of content to make it appear or act in a certain way. The enclosing tags can make content into a hyperlink to connect to another page, italicize words, and so on. For example consider the following line of text:

My cat is very grumpy

[!Warning]
Information that needs to be taken seriously. Avoid too many of these.

If we wanted the text to stand by itself, we could specify that it is a paragraph by enclosing it in a paragraph <p> element:

<p>My cat is very grumpy</p>

Note: Tags in HTML are not case-sensitive. This means they can be written in uppercase or lowercase. For example, a <title> tag could be written as <title>, <TITLE>, <Title>, <TiTle>, etc. and it will work. However, it is best practice to write all tags in lowercase for consistency and readability.