This chapter will cover the basics of understanding HTML, as well as tags, text, links, images, tables and lists.
Let’s first introduce HTML again in slightly more detail. We know already that HTML is the language responsible for explaining our content and webpage structure to the web browser for it to interpret and display to the end user; now let’s explore just how that works.
An HTML page is formed of many different HTML elements. Elements are represented by tags. A tag is a piece of code that we wrap around our content to describe what type of content it is; it is effectively a label for our content. We might use a tag to explain to the browser that our snippet of text is a header, or a paragraph, or even a bullet point list.
These tags are interpreted by the browser, but not displayed to the end user. They are simply used to tell the browser what the content is and therefore how to display it.
Let’s break down the anatomy of an HTML tag. HTML tags typically come in pairs: an opening tag and a closing tag. The first tag tells the browser where our element starts and the second tag tells it where our content ends. We call these tags the ‘opening tag’ and the ‘closing tag’, and they have slightly different syntaxes.
Table 2.1 HTML glossary
HTML elements |
The building blocks of an HTML page, it is an individual component of the HTML document, which usually houses some content of some form |
Metadata |
Metadata is data that describes other data |