Almost every organization, business, and advocacy group in the world has a website. Even individuals have websites to promote their brands and services. This applies to any industry across the globe, from finance and tech to medicine and various arts.
If you want to create an online presence, it is important that you consider getting a website of your own. You always have the option to hire web developers to build a website for you. These professionals will help you get your website going by providing the right hosting service, securing a domain name, and giving your site the structure and form it needs.
However, there might come a time when you want to make changes yourself or you simply want to get into the business of web coding. When this happens, you need to know about the foundation of web development and this includes HTML. Here’s what you should know about this subject.
What Exactly Is HTML?
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. This is primarily used to establish the structure of a web page and the things it contains. Keep in mind that this is not a programming language but a markup language. It makes use of tags, attributes, and elements that have specific purposes in creating a web page and content structure.
Definitions Of Important Web Coding Terms
For the untrained mind, all these words may be difficult to digest. This is why it is important to have a brief review of relevant terms and their meanings. Check them out.
- Markup languages – These are basically languages that annotate or “marks up” texts, giving systems cues on how to specifically manipulate the text. It is usually written using Notepad for PCs and TextEdit in Mac systems. Some examples of this are HTML, AppML, XML, and WML.
- Elements – These are parts of the code that have start tags, content and end tags. It is usually nested, which means that there are other sets of start and end tags within a set.
- Tags – These provide a definition of how the system should format and show the content. They come in pairs enclosed within two angle brackets. Start tags are written as tagnames in angle brackets, while end tags are written as tagnames in angle brackets but with a forward slash before the name.
- Attributes – These specify characteristics of the elements. They are usually written with names and values and are placed in the start tag. This is formatted as the tagname attribute name, followed by an equal sign, then the attribute value.
Most Common Tags And Attributes
Tags and attributes are the foundation of HTML. These define the presentation type and qualities of the content. Here are some of the commonly used attributes and tags that can help you get started.
- <html> </html> - This defines the document specifically as HTML.
- <head> </head> - This is used to characterize the head element of the entire document including the title, scripts used, styles, meta information, and many others.
- <title> </title> - This defines the document title, which will appear as the title of the web page itself. This is what will show up in search engine results.
- <body> </body> - This is where the entire content of the document goes. Just like an essay where the body covers what the writer has to say, the content written within the body tag is what will appear inside the web page.
- id – This is a unique identifier that refers to a specific style from a style sheet.
- img src – If you choose to include images into your document, you need to specify the source from which you retrieved the image. This attribute points to the source.
- style – This applies what style to use for the element. This will bypass any style that is set for the entire document.
- class – This specifies a style for a class name. This helps format all elements of the class attribute with the same style.
Bottom Line
Now that you know the most fundamental aspects of HTML, you can start learning how to write web coding. Who knows, you might be able to move on to more complicated languages and launch your career not only as a web coder but as a developer too!
Last updated on November 17th, 2022 at 08:49 pm
