Supposedly...
HTML, short for HyperText Markup Language, is the code that is used to
structure a webpage and its contents.
Dafuq does that mean
Let's say you woke up this morning and decided to make a website about
cats.
How would you go about doing that?
Without having a computer science degree, there are some things you
already know.
For example, you know that you "go to a website" by using a web browser
whether it's Chrome, Firefox, or whatever.
You also know that each website is unique.
Some websites are wildly colorful and complex while some are simple and
muted.
You might go to one website to play some games, then a different one to
read the news.
You might go to one website to order some new furniture, then go to a
different one to pay your electricity bill.
As of mid-2022, there's almost 1.2 BILLION websites in
the world.
With all these sophisticated websites involving complex search engines
and unimaginable algorithms, surely you should be able to make a small
little blog about cats.
But how?
Enter HTML.
HTML is simply a "language" you use to speak to a web browser.
You use HTML to tell a browser what to display, and how to display it,
on your website.
If we were to analogize a website to a human, HTML would be the
skeleton.
Although every human is unique in their own special way, every human has
a skeleton, right?
That's the same for a webpage!
Structure of an HTML document
Although an HTML document can be tediously long, full of all kinds of
mumbo-jumbo, and sometimes difficult to read-- remember that all HTML
documents follow this structure:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title> Title goes here! </title>
</head>
<body>
Content goes here!
</body>
</html>
Elements & Tags & Content, oh my!
An HTML document is made up of a bunch of elements.
An element starts with an opening tag and ends with a closing tag, those
funny looking triangle diamond things.
In between those tags go the content (the stuffs that people see when
they visit your website).
So basically, everything that is visible inside of a web browser is the content--
and the tags define how that content appears.
Each set of tags plus the content within those tags is one element-- and
a bunch of elements make up an HTML document.
The web browser reads your HTML document then "renders" (a fancy word
for displays) your content.
Next, let's learn about some of the most commonly used HTML Tags.
Next: HTML Tags pt. 1