Welcome to our series on learning HTML! We're so excited to have you with us as we dive deep into what HTML is and learning the basics of how to build a website! Time to begin!
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the foundation code for all websites and web apps. It is NOT a programming language, and it does not have the ability to execute functions, calculations, or anything other than render content.
HTML contains a series of elements, and inside those elements, pieces of content to display on the website. Modern websites use some sort of backend language in combination with templates to generate the final code that is used to render their pages, but it's important to understand the markup behind a website in order to troubleshoot any problems.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>This is a title!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a heading.</h1>
<p>This is a sample paragraph!</p>
</body>
</html>You'll notice that every element in HTML has angle brackets < > on either side of the word, and that most elements have what's called a "closing tag" to signify the end of that element. Closing tags are defined by the forward slash / that appears after the first angle bracket.
Not every element requires a closing tag, but we'll get into the specifics of that soon enough.