Intro to HTML
A web page is a file that ends in html (hyper-text markup language). A browser renders its contents into a web page.
HTML is the language of web sites. It it not a programming language because you cannot run loops and logic. It is what's known as a markup language. It's purpose is to define the structure of a website, not how it looks. How it looks is defined using style sheets (more of that later).
Elements of a web page are declared via opening and closing tags. For example, the web page title might be written as:
<title>Awesome Website</title>HTML, Head and Body
All html files start and end with the <html></html> tag that tell a browser to expect to see html. Within the <html> block there are two others, the <head></head> and <body></body>
The <head> block contains things like the page title, links to external libraries that let you programme a web page, and meta data that does things like tell search engines what kind of content your website contains.
The <body> block contains the actual contents of the website, links, images, titles etc.
Hello Word
So the most basic website you can imagine would look like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello World
</body>
</html>Creating Your First HTML File
Since a web page is just a bunch of text that a browser uses to build a web page, we can use a simple text editor to create a basic web page.
On a Mac, open the Text Editor (command-shift >> type text editor). On a PC, open notepad.
The Text Editor by default writes files in a format called Rich Text Format (.rtf). We don't want that, it's rubbish and browsers don't understand it. So step 1 is to tell the Text Editor to write in plane text.
Under the Format menu, select Make Plain Text
We can now past in our Hello World example
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello World
</body>
</html>
Save the file somewhere easy to find but replace the .txt at the end of the file with .html. You will get a warning but click Use .html to save your first HTML file.
Navigate to the file in Finder and open it to see your first web page.
Extension: Explore what other HTML tags a browser can understand.
Last updated
Was this helpful?