HTML for Absolute Beginners

What is HTML?

2 min read Last updated 45 minutes ago

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is not a programming language — it is a markup language, which means it describes the structure and meaning of your content.

When you visit a website, your browser downloads an HTML document and renders it on screen. The browser reads tags like <h1>, <p> and <img> to know what each piece of content is.

The anatomy of a tag

Most tags come in pairs: an opening tag and a closing tag.

html

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

<p> is the opening tag
</p> is the closing tag (notice the forward slash)
The text between them is the tag's content

Some tags are self-closing and do not wrap content:

html

<img src="photo.jpg" alt="A mountain at sunset">
<br>

Don't forget the closing tag

Forgetting a closing tag is the single most common HTML mistake. If your page looks broken, check that every opening tag has a matching closing tag.

A minimal document

Every HTML page starts with the same skeleton:

html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>My First Page</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
</body>
</html>

Part	Purpose
`<!DOCTYPE html>`	Tells the browser this is modern HTML5
`<head>`	Metadata: title, charset, links to CSS
`<body>`	The visible content of the page

Your first exercise

Create a new file named index.html
Copy the skeleton above into it
Open the file in your browser

You should see "Hello, world!" displayed as a large heading. Congratulations — you just wrote your first web page.

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