Introduction to HTML
HTML — HyperText Markup Language — is the language every web page is written in. It describes what content a page contains and what each piece is: this is a heading, this is a paragraph, this is a link, this is a form. Browsers read HTML and turn it into the pages you see.
What HTML does
HTML wraps content in tags that give it meaning. Here's a tiny page — edit the text in the editor and watch the result update:
Without tags, the browser would show one long line of text. With them, it knows that "My Recipe Blog" is the main heading, the ingredients form a list, and the last line is a link.
HTML, CSS and JavaScript
Web pages are built from three languages that work together:
| Language | Job | Analogy |
|---|---|---|
| HTML | Structure and meaning of the content | The walls and rooms of a house |
| CSS | Appearance: colours, fonts, layout | Paint and furniture |
| JavaScript | Behaviour and interactivity | Electricity and plumbing |
HTML always comes first. A page with only HTML is plain but completely usable — which is exactly how screen readers, search engines and slow connections experience the web.
Markup, not programming
HTML isn't a programming language: it has no variables, loops or calculations. It's a markup language — a way of annotating content. That makes it the gentlest place to start learning web development, and something every web developer uses every day regardless of their framework.
A complete page
Real HTML files have a standard outer structure. You'll learn every line of this in lesson 03:
How a browser shows a page
- The browser downloads the HTML file from a server (or opens it from your computer).
- It parses the tags into a tree of objects called the DOM (Document Object Model).
- It fetches any CSS, images and scripts the page refers to.
- It works out the layout and paints the page on screen.
Browsers are very forgiving: if your HTML has a mistake, they make a best guess rather than refusing to show the page. That's friendly, but it means mistakes can go unnoticed — lesson 46 shows how to validate your HTML.
A brief history
HTML was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 at CERN. Today it's a "living standard" maintained by WHATWG, a group including the major browser makers, and updated continuously rather than in numbered versions. People still say "HTML5" to mean modern HTML, which added elements like <video>, <nav> and <canvas>.
How this course works
- Try it yourself editors show a live preview — type in the code and the result updates as you go.
- Every example has been checked with an HTML validator.
- Practise with the exercises, test yourself with the quiz, and finish by building a portfolio page in lesson 48.