What is HTML?

HTML is a common acronym that most people have probably heard before, but it may be less clear what it actually is and what it accomplishes. The term HTML stands for hyper text markup language. It’s a computer language used by web developers and other computer professionals to create web pages, yet anyone can use it to develop or edit a website. There have been many versions of HTML over time, and the current standard is HTML5. Let’s take a deeper look at what HTML does and how you would use it.

Is HTML a Programming Language?

Yes, HTML is a programming language. It uses elements that describe a piece of content, such as a heading or a link, and tells the browser how to display those elements to form the layout and content of the web page. When you see the version of the web page that is visible to the public, only the content is displayed, not the HTML elements.

For example, a web developer would use HTML to tell the browser that a phrase is a heading, to show the location where it should be on the page and to show attributes about it such as the size, boldness and color of the text.

What Are the Basic Elements of HTML?

An element of HTML includes the content with a start tag before it and an end tag after it. Each tag is written between angle brackets that look like this: <>. The start tag says how the following content should be displayed, and the end tag says when that command should stop.

For example, to distinguish a heading in HTML, you would use the tag h1. To show where you want the heading to begin, use <h1>. Then put </h1> to show where you want the heading to end. So the element for a heading would be <h1>Heading Content</h1>.

Nonetheless, there are some exceptions in the HTML world. Sometimes an element doesn’t describe content but rather something else about the web page. In this case, these are empty elements and they have no end tag. For example, to display a line break, you simply write <br> by itself.

What Are the Advantages of HTML?

HTML is not the only programming language to know or use, but it has certain advantages. HTML has a long history, is basic and is friendly to search engines and supported by the various browsers. It’s easy to learn, use and edit, and it’s even easy to use with other languages. These are just some of the many advantages of HTML.

What Are the 10 Basic HTML Tags?

While there are many HTML tags to learn, you’ll probably be using 10 of them more than the others until they become second nature. These are the 10 basic HTML tags to know:

  1. Titles: <h1>
  2. Line breaks: <br>
  3. Main HTML part: <body>
  4. Paragraph: <p>
  5. Style part of the text: <span>
  6. Bold: <b>
  7. Italics: <i>
  8. Link: <a>
  9. Division of an HTML document: <div>
  10. Images: <img>

Is HTML Hard to Learn?

Overall, HTML is easy for most people to learn once you get the basic idea. The hard part might be learning and remembering the many tags, but you can always look at a list until you remember them. HTML is also simple to edit.

HTML is a basic programming language that’s easy to learn and apply. You can achieve a lot by knowing only some basic HTML tags, and the more you learn, the more control you will have over a web page.