HTML: The Barebones Structure

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) uses simple commands called tags to define the various parts of a web page. For example, this HTML code creates a simple web page:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/
html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>Hey, I am the title of this web page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hey, I am a paragraph on this web page.</p>
</body>
</html>

It may not be exciting, but this example has all the basic elements a web page needs. You'll notice something called a DOCTYPE declaration at the very beginning of the code, followed by html (between brackets), a head, a body, and some stuff—the actual page contents—inside the body, ending in a final </html>.