HTML is short for "HyperText Markup Language". This simply means a language for describing web-pages using ordinary text. Note that HTML is not as complex as other programming language like JAVA, PHP and others. Every web page is an HTML file with just a plain-text file, but with a .html file extension instead of .txt, and is made up of many HTML tags as well as the content for a web page. A web site will often contain many html files that link to each other which can be edited with any of your favourite text editor.
HTML Tags: These are re the hidden keywords within in web page that define how your web browser must format and display the content. An HTML code tag have two tags, an opening tag and a closing tag. For example, < html > is the opening tag and < /html > is the closing tag. Note that the closing tag has the same text as the opening tag, but has an additional forward-slash ( / ) character.
Though some tags may not obey the above rule. This maybe that the closing ( / ) tag is not necessary in most cases. A good example is the tag for showing images.
Tag Attributes
Attributes allow you to customise a tag, and are defined within the opening tag, for example:
< im g src="imagename"> or Attributes are often assigned a value using the equals sign, such as border="0" or width="50%", but there are some that only need to be declared in the tag.
Most attributes are optional for most tags, and are only used when you want to make changes to the default way a tag is displayed by the browser. However, some tags has required attributes such as src and alt which are needed in order for the browser to display the web page correctly.
Below is a basic html document, containing all the essential tags. You can copy the code below, paste it into your editor, and save as "mypage.html" to start your own web page.
< html >
< head >
< title > My Page Title
< body >
This is where all my web page content goes!
< /html >