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What is HTML?
HTML is short for ‘HyperText Markup Language’. As intimidating as it may sound, we promise it’s not!
Let’s break it down:
- Hypertext: Hypertext refers to the method we use to navigate around the web – clicking on links, or hyperlinks, which sends you to different pages. We refer to the text and links as ‘hyper’, because navigation is not linear – there is no set order to navigate the web.
- Markup: The markup tells the browser how to display a website’s words and images for the user. Each individual markup code is referred to as a tag, or an element.
- Language: Just like any other language, HTML has code-words and syntax.
HTML is the building block of the web, and the first language we recommend to anyone with an interest in development. It’s responsible for talking to your computer, and telling it what each part of a website is, and what information it should display. It’s responsible for the structure of your site, and although other languages or properties are required to make your site ‘pretty’, HTML is technically the only language you really need to build a website.
HTML is written using a series of tags – we use these to tell your computer what each piece of content is. For example: if we want to display an image, we’ll use an <img> tag, if we want to display a heading, we’ll use a <h1> tag.
