HTML — an introduction

HTML (hypertext markup language) refers to a representation and the organization of a web page's structure.

This is what HTML looks like:

Topics

• Introduction
  • 🛡️➡️ HTML setup
• HTML basics
  • 🛡️💬 Comments
    • documenting the HTML
  • 🛡️🏷️ Tags
    • the building blocks of a webpage
  • 🛡️🗒️ Tag attributes
    • describing those building blocks
  • 🛡️🍱 Semantic HTML
    • giving those building blocks some more meaningful names
• HTML features
  • 🛡️🏓 Tables
    • organizing similar records of data together on a webpage
  • 🛡️📋 Forms
    • adding user interactivity to a webpage
• HTML reference
  • 🛡️😊 Special characters
    • adding non-alpha/numeric text

What is hypertext?

Hypertext easily breaks down into two components: "hyper" and "text". The prefix "hyper-" (related to "super" and "over") indicates something "extreme" and "beyond" something. The "text" part indicates words. Thus, "hypertext" would mean something like "an extension of text".

In the context of the internet, "hypertext" involves not only text, but images, video and other kinds of embeddable media. Thus, the HT in HTML tells us that a webpage could involve more than just words on a screen.

(Most early webpages contained only text, but almost every webpage nowadays has more than just text!)

What is markup language?

Markup goes back to the days of traditional publishing when people would "mark up" a manuscript with mentions to attributes such as font faces and font sizes. Typesetters would then follow these "marks" to know how to format a final document. So, in the context of HTML, a language simply means a convention of doing such a thing.

Hence, markup language (the ML in HTML) simply means a way of formatting the aforementioned hypertext.