HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.
It isn’t a programming language but a system for laying out, formatting and displaying web pages.
What is it and what is it used for?
You’ve surely heard of HTML, probably a thousand times.
After all, it’s one of the most basic terms in computing. But let’s try to explain what it really is and how it works.
As we’ve already said, it’s a markup language.
It’s used to specify how we want to arrange the elements of a hypertext document. In short, it’s the skeleton of a web page, complete with headings, paragraphs, lists, images, links, videos and so on.
To define these elements, HTML uses tags: keywords placed between two angle brackets (< >).
The job of interpreting this code falls to browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox.
The result? The pages as we see them.
The basic structure of an HTML page
An HTML page is made of plain text. To work properly it must contain at least three essential tags: html, head and body.
Let’s take a closer look at what they do.
- <html> = the container tag, the one that wraps the entire page.
- <head> = identifies the document header. This is where you place tags that give instructions to the browser or useful information to search engines, such as the title, scripts, links to stylesheets, meta tags and more. Note that it isn’t displayed.
- <body> = the most important tag. It holds the actual content of the page, its visible part, including text and hyperlinks.
Please note: tags can be written in either lowercase or uppercase.
Why is it so widespread?
HTML was developed in the late 1980s by Tim Berners-Lee and took off in the early 1990s, along with the first commercial uses of the web.
But what are the reasons for its huge success, now that we’ve even reached the HTML5 standard?
The answer is fairly simple. It’s a universal, open language, in the public domain. Plus, it doesn’t require installing any software.
Thinking about building your website with a CMS? Keep in mind that platforms such as WordPress and Drupal are very easy to use.
But HTML lets you create complex, highly customized sites, with no limits on your creativity. It just takes a little more effort.