Overview of HTML
HTML is the standard markup language for creating Web pages.
What is HTML?
- HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
- HTML is the standard markup language for creating Web pages
- HTML describes the structure of a Web page
- HTML consists of a series of elements
- HTML elements tell the browser how to display the content
- HTML elements label pieces of content such as "this is a heading", "this is a paragraph", "this is a link", etc.
Who Invented HTML
HTML was invented in November 1990 by a scientist called Tim Berneses-Lee. The purpose
was to make it easier for scientists at different university to gain access to each other’s
research documents.
A Brief history
HTML is not an invention but an improved version of Standard Generalised Markup Language(SGML).SGML is a Meta Language (general -- purpose language)used for defining and creating descriptive markup language.
What tools do you need?
To get started with html documents, only two basic things are required
• A text editor/HTML editor
• A Web Browser
Tags and Attributes
The World Wide Web Consortium has given a set of standards while building the HTML
language. The W3C uses some special words to define an action.
A tag is a special word enclosed in angle-brackets < >. A tag tells the browser to perform
an action as asked by the special word. The special word may be written either in lower
case or upper case. The browser will respond to both the cases equally.
The HTML tags are normally comes in pair of start and end tag(an opening tag and closing
tag). While the start tag is written in the beginning of the element as <SpecialWord>, the
end tag is written at the completion of the element as </SpecialWord>.
For example: When you want to begin with writing source code using HTML, you write
the start tag as <HTML> and when you have completely written in the HTML document
and want to end it, you write the end tag as </HTML> i.e. insert a forward slash followed
by HTML in angled brackets.
The characteristics or the features of a tag are defined by an attribute. An attribute is used
inside a tag. An attribute always takes a value to help the browser perform the specific
task in a particular direction. There may be more than one attribute used inside a tag.
An element is a combination of a start tag, the text(we also use text to insert graphics)
and the end tag.
For example:
<body> element begins with start tag, followed by text and ends with end tag.</body>
In simple words, one can equate an element to a block, a tag to an instruction and an
attribute to an extension to a instruction.
Container of Tags: One set of tags may contain another set of tags. This is called nesting
of tags. The second block of tags is always contained in first block as shown below:
<TAG1> <TAG2>……………</TAG2> </TAG1>
<TAG1> and </TAG1> is the first block of tags. <TAG2> and </TAG2> is the second
block of tags.
