From the course: Introduction to Web Design and Development

Understanding HTML

From the course: Introduction to Web Design and Development

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Understanding HTML

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- HTML is the hypertext markup language. HTML is all about identifying commonly used structural elements like paragraphs, headings, lists, links, and more. Computers understand the structure of a document through this type of markup. This will help with searching documents, search engine optimization and making documents accessible to those with disabilities. Let's go over those key points again. First, HTML is all about the page structure. Notice we haven't mentioned something blue or having a different font. That's not part of HTML. That's CSS, or cascading style sheets. Your web browser has a certain unstyled look that it assigns to raw HTML, but HTML has no inherent look of its own. Second, HTML is all about elements. There's an element for every need it seems like. There are over 100 elements you can work with. Finally, use the right element for the right structure. If you're representing a paragraph, use a paragraph element. If you're using a quote, use a quote element. Let's quickly go through how HTML is formed. Here is an example of a link. This is made up of opening and closing tags. In this case, the A tag. A stands for anchor, and it's used in creating links. When we talk about the two tags together, this refers to the element. You'll notice in the opening tag, we have a few modifiers available to us called attributes. The href attribute stands for hyper text reference. In other words, where do we want this link to go? The target attribute addresses where we'd like this link to open. In this case, we wanted to open it in a new window or tab in the browser rather than the default behavior of the same window or tab. The words in between the opening and closing tags are the text affected by the tags. In this case, this text will function on the page as a link. How will that look? Well, that depends on what the CSS says. By default, links are blue and underlined according to our browser's style sheet, but it's likely your website developers have overridden that default behavior and made it look somewhat different. Finally, you can have elements nested inside of elements. Here, I've used the paragraph element composed of these P tags to wrap around our text. Notice that elements are nested inside of each other like wooden dolls. The tag is completely contained within the paragraph. That's the proper way to work with your HTML tags. You can't close the paragraph before all of the elements inside are closed. HTML is an excellent skill to master as many content creators wind up encountering a little HTML here and there. If you're wondering if code might be something fun, HTML is an excellent place to start exploring.

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