HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE (HTML) is one of the few fundamental things which all websites are built upon. There are many other different types of coding languages, but HTML is the most basic used when building websites. For now, we will keep things simple and start from the absolute basics of HTML.
HTML in some ways can be thought of being very similar to a sandwich. It consists of a header, body, paragraph, and footer. These layers of code must be in an organized order. The example shown below is technically the simplest form of a web page that can be written.
<html>
<body>
<h1>Heading</h1>
<p>paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
All code in HTML format must always begin with a header tag and end with a footer tag. These tags create a hierarchy within the HTML page, where content is organized when the web browser displays it on the computer screen.
For example, the header tag <html> tells the web browser to start here at the tag. The computer will process the code between the header tag and the footer tag, line by line until it finds the footer tag </html> which then tells the computer that this is the end of the section of code and to stop processing.
<html>
<body>
<h1>Heading</h1>
<p>paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
The <body> is the next section of the code. This tag is where the content (text) of the website is written. This piece of code follows the same format as the <html> tags.
Remember the ending part of the tag always has the “/” before the tag name.
The <h1>Heading</h1> line code represents the following:
The <h1> and </h1> tags control the size of the font for the text. Whatever is in between these two tags will get formatted to the default <h1> setting. These tags can have many numbers but usually, go from 1-10. The “h” tags can also be formatted to look different with the help of CSS (cascading style sheets).
The section tag <p>paragraph.</p> is for text which assists the web browser in displaying readable wording within the web page.