HTML
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the base code language used for web pages on the internet. It provides web browsers with the structure of a web page, which is then interpreted by the web browser and displayed to the user in a human-readable format. HTML has consistently evolved since its introduction, with the current standard being HTML5. While HTML is the basis of web development, a typical modern web page will also use CSS (for styling) and JavaScript (for interactivity).
HTML consists of tags, attributes, and content.
- HTML tags outline the structure of a web page, defining headings, paragraphs, lists, links, columns, sections, etc. An HTML tag is defined by opening and closing angle brackets ('<' and '>') with the details of the tag (including the tag type and any attributes) between the angle brackets. Typically, HTML tags have an opening tag and a closing tag with content or other tags in between, where the closing tag is identified by a slash ('/') after the '<' but before the tag type. An example of an HTML tag would be
<h1>This is a Primary Heading</h1>, where<h1>is the opening tag and</h1>is the closing tag. In this example 'h1' is the type of tag, which in this case is a 'Heading 1' or 'primary heading' tag which is used to define the most important heading on a page. - HTML attributes provide more information about tags, such as where a link actually goes, or style information that informs a web browser about how the tag should be displayed. An example of an attribute within a tag is:
<img src="/my_website_files/image_source.jpg" />wheresrc="/my_website_files/image_source.jpg"is the attribute. In this case the attribute 'src' has the value of '/my_website_files/image_source.jpg'. The 'src' attribute of an HTML 'img' (image) tag specifies the actual file location of the image that should be displayed. - The content is everything between the opening and closing of a specific tag. For example, in
<h1>This is a Primary Heading</h1>,This is a Primary Headingis the content of the 'h1' tag.
Document Structure
A typical HTML document consists of <html>, <head>, and <body> tags, where the 'html' tag wraps the entire document, the 'head' tag contains all relevant metadata for the page (such as the page title, links to supporting CSS and JavaScript files, etc.), and the 'body' tag contains all of the visible web page content.
Semantic HTML and Accessibility
Since the introduction of HTML5, HTML has included support for semantic elements, such as <article>, <section>, and <nav> elements, which are used to more easily identify the purpose of those parts of the overall document structure and the content within them. Proper use of these semantic tags improves the accessibility of a website for screen readers and other assistive technologies, as well as providing better context for search engines like Google, which can help improve a website's search engine ranking.
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