HTML Basics

Xah Lee, 2009-09-29, 2011-10-04

This page gives a very basic, practical introduction to HTML.

HTML is a very simple markup language. Here's a example. Save the following text in a file, name it 〔sample.html〕, then open the file in a browser.

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

<html>
<head>
<title>Sample HTML</title>
</head>

<body>
<h1>Sample HTML</h1>
<p>Earth is round!</p>
</body>

</html>

Basically, text are enclosed by tags. For example, in the above, the <html>…</html> wraps around the whole file indicating that the whole file is a HTML file.

The <head>…</head> contains some meta info about the file. The <title>…</title> gives the title of the file.

What's between <body> and </body> are the content of the file. The <h1>…</h1> is the header of the content. The <p> is a paragraph.

Each of the <…> is called a tag.

HTML is extremely simple.

Versions of HTML

There are many versions of HTML and XHTML, and it is really a mess. If you are creating new pages, not maintaining old websites, i recommend HTML5. Put the following line at the beginning of your file.

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

See: HTML5 Tags.

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