HTML

WHAT IS HTML?

Currently, most people have seen hundreds of web pages but many will ask: What is HTML? What is it for? How does it work? Is it difficult to write in HTML? Where can I write HTML? And other questions like these will be answered below.

“HTML is a markup language that is used for the development of Internet pages. This is the acronym that corresponds to HyperText Markup Language, that is, Hypertext Markup Language ”.

However, this type of definitions does not tell us much because the definition is technical. For some people when reading this, they think that HTML includes the graphic design of web pages, however, that is not true since HTML only serves to indicate how the content of a web page is sorted. This is done through hypertext marks which are tags known in English as tags.

Now that we understand the concept of labels, we need to be able to identify them. These are characterized by the fact that the characters are less than <and greater than>, as in this example: <Here is the name of the label>


There are certain exceptions for the purpose of the tags, since some are usually only used with the beginning of the tag, examples of this are the BR (line break), IMG (tag to put an image) tags, among others.

We're almost ready to write HTML but we still have to see the structure of an HTML code. Our code should always start with the HTML tag. Below is an example of the structure of the HTML code. Now we will see a small example of the body of an HTML code with some effects in the text such as italic, underline, bold.
HTML is not a programming language, this should be very clear from the beginning, HTML is a hypertext markup language or "HyperText Markup Language" for the development of its initials in English, basically this language is written entirely with elements, these elements are made up of labels, content and attributes, which we will explain in a more detailed way in some lines below.

HTML is a language interpreted by the web browser to display web sites or applications as we are used to. In Image 1 you will see how the browser shows us a website and in Image 2 you will see how it looks in HTML language.



History:

The first version of HTML was published by a British computer scientist named Timohty John Berners-Lee in 1991 and initially contained few elements, which you can know here. About Tim, you should also know that he is known as the father of the web, he is the founder of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), creator of the HTTP protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol), creator of the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and creator of the First web browser.
                                                                     

On the history of HTML, the HTML 2.0 standard, the first official HTML standard, was published in 1995. In 1997 the HTML version 3.2 was published and is the first HTML specification published by the W3C.

In 1999 the HTML version 4.1 was published and in 2014 the final version of HTML 5 was published.

HTML is a language formed by elements, an element looks like all the text shown in Image 3, the elements help us to structure and give meaning to the parts of an HTML document, these elements in turn are made up of content , tags and attributes.

The labels serve to define the beginning and the end of an element, as in the example, we see an element that uses the opening label

to indicate the beginning of a paragraph, and the closing tag

to indicate the end of a paragraph.

The content of an element can be characters, comments or other element delimited within the start and end tags, in the example you can see that the content is: "Content of the element p".

About the attributes of an element you should know that they are always expressed in the start tag and have a name (eg id) and a value (eg paragraph), in the example we see the use of the id attribute with its respective value.


Note that not all items have closing tags. Although there is much more information about HTML that has not been developed in this article, if you are interested in knowing more about HTML, how to complement it with CSS or learn how to create your first web page, I recommend the following course: HTML and CSS course

Finally, we just need to know where to write code in HTML and for this we only need a text editor such as notepad, although in my opinion I would recommend that you download Sublime Text because it facilitates the writing of HTML code. If you still want to know if HTML is easy to write, I would say yes, because there is no greater obstacle in learning than your own desire to learn, in addition to the fact that as children we have learned to distinguish and classify everything around us and it is basically what HTML is responsible for so there won't be much difficulty.