Transcript for:
Understanding HTML Basics and Structure

What is HTML? With any document we read, the structure of the page helps us understand the message. The heading and subheadings give some structure to this page. It's HTML's job to give structure like this to a web page.

This HTML code shows a few different elements that make up the structure of this page. The HTML elements are shown in red with angle brackets. They usually have an opening and closing tag. The closing tags have a slash after the first angle bracket. Each element tells the browser what kind of information is between its opening and closing tag.

Some tags contain other tags. The HTML tag has all the other tags between its opening and closing tag. The body tag contains all the tags that will display in the page of the browser.

This is called nesting. You have tags inside of other tags. or parent and child tags. The text between the h1 tags or heading level 1 tag is the main heading.

h2 tags are one level down from the main heading. In this case they are used as subheadings. And the text between the p tags is the paragraph text.

HTML stands for hypertext markup language. Hypertext refers to the way we can place hypertext links in our document that allows our users to move from one page to another. Markup is a set of symbols or codes for displaying content on the Internet.

It's not a programming language, it's a markup language that tells web browsers like Chrome, Safari, or Edge the structure of a web page's words and images. This markup language includes the tags that we make to code around the content. Then the browser will use this code to display or render our pages correctly.

This is a simple HTML framework or beginning of an HTML file or page. Notice there is nothing inside the body tag yet, so nothing would actually show up on the browser page. But these HTML elements begin an HTML file.

An HTML file can be created in any simple text editor. There's no need for any special program to write HTML code. There are good code editors, however, that can be used that might be helpful when writing your code.

The first line here lets the browser know which version of HTML is being used. It is the Document Type Declaration. This declaration lets the browser know to expect an HTML version 5 document. The HTML element is the container for all the other HTML tags.

The head element contains elements that tell about the page rather than what's on the page. The head here has one title element that contains the text page title. That text will show up in the title bar or tab at the top of the browser window, not in the page itself.

The body tag is where all the elements that make up the page will go. If you look at it the source of any web page you will see this HTML structure.