What is HTML?
The full form of HTML is Hypertext Markup Language. First of all we should understand what is a markup? Markup refers to the data included in an electronic document which is not the part of the content and is used to control the display or enrich the content. So, a markup language is the set of rules governing what markup can be included in the document and how it is combined with the content.
HTML is not the first markup language, yet it is most popular one. Most of the websites use HTML as their primary markup language. HTML had predecessors like SGML and TeX etc. HTML was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993 and was poorly implemented by many different browsers since then. So, the standardization of HTML started taking place which introduced many version of HTML and XML based XHTML. The most popular HTML version was HTML 4.1 and now a days HTML 5 is gaining a lot of attention as it is well supported by most of the modern browsers.
Sample HTML document
A HTML document look like below:
<!DOCTYPE html> <!-- DOCTYPE declaration tag specifies which HTML standard is being used -->
<html> <!-- html tag is root element of HTML document -->
<head> <!-- head tag contains all meta information about page and common style, scripts -->
<title>See this @ Browser Window Title Bar</title>
</head>
<body> <!-- body tag contains all the visible content of the HTML page -->
<h1> HTML Heading use hx tags i.e. h1, h2 ... h6</h1>
<p> Paragraphs are created using 'p' tags </p>
</body>
</html>
Anything insite <!– and –> is a comment which is ignored by the browser and hence can be used to describe the code or comment out the unused code ( leaving commented out code isn’t a good practice).
The above code will be render as below in browser. Please check browser tab title and page contents:
