What Is HTML Code & What Is It Used For? – A Beginners Guide To Learning HTML
Written By: Grant Darling January 15, 2020
What Is HTML Code?
HTML is an acronym for Hypertext Markup Language and is the markup language used to display information on a web browser. Okay, so that might already be confusing, so let's practice our programming skills and break this into steps! The first word, 'hypertext', is explained in the Cambridge dictionary as "a way of joining a word or image to another page, document, etc. on the internet or in another computer program so that you can move from one to the other easily". This essentially means we can add text or media into a document, or webpage, from another source. The second word, "markup" is the code used to add this text or media into the document or webpage. We can think of the code as being the vehicle that transmits this text or media onto the webpage. Finally, 'language', in this context, can be thought of as the rules used by this code to act the way it does. With this information, we can now start to understand that HTML is a language that allows us to insert information onto a webpage with code! If you don't fully understand yet (which is normal), the examples provided later on should help clear things up.A Brief History of HTML
HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. Since then, HTML has gone through five major revisions lead mostly by the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), made up of individuals from Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, Opera Software, and Google. As of 2020, we use the version of HTML titled HTML5. HTML5 was created to address the multi-platform and multi-device world we live in today. If you'd like to read up on the updates up to and including HTML5, you can do so here. It is important to note that every webpage that you view uses some form of HTML, which will also be covered below!Examples of HTML
As we now know, HTML makes up all of the elements displayed on a page. Even the words you are reading right now are displayed here using HTML code. In order to write a paragraph in HTML, like above, we use code that looks like this:<p></p>
The 'p' within these opening and closing brackets stand for 'paragraph'. So if we just wanted to display the text "Hello World!", we could write it on the webpage with this one line of code: Simple right? Well, there is actually one more step. In order to set-up a webpage with HTML, we need to use what is referred to as 'skeleton' or boilerplate code. It is the code needed to start every project in HTML. Now, this may look scary at first but this is how we set up our HTML document. It is the same in every HTML project and eventually becomes second nature to see and understand. Right now, the document above doesn't add anything visible to our webpage. You can think of the <html> & </html> tags as a container that holds our <head> and <body> tags between them. Which are, themselves, containers to hold their own code. Containers, do not display anything, they hold elements that are then displayed to the page. Now, this is a very broad look at HTML, but it should start to make a little bit more sense. If you wanted to write the text "Hello World!" Within this document, we would simply copy our code from the top example into our HTML skeleton. Like so: