HTML For Beginners: Part 1

Shresthi Jaiswal
Mar 31, 2015
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HISTORY

IBM sowed the seed of HTML in the early 1980s. Initially , it was known by the name General Markup Language (GML). It was a powerful language that aimed at creating a document in which one could mark the title, text, heading and much more.

In 1986, the concept of GML became standardized by the ISO. The standardized GML is called Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). In 1989, Sir Tim Berners Lee and his team designed Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) as an SGML application in which:

HYPER TEXT means a complete code package that allows the user to create WebPages that includes text and graphics and also you can add links to your WebPages
MARKUP means to highlighting the text by underlining or displaying it with colours
LANGUAGE refer to the mode of communications among the webpages

Necessary HTML Tags

(Note that upper-case/lower-case is not important,)

The "guts" of every HTML file must look like this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Document's name which appears in the heading, not on the page</title>
</head>
<body>
Type in the information you want to appear on the page here
</body>
</html>

Basic HTML Structure

HTML (<HTML> .. </HTML>)

The HTML documents starts with <HTML> tags and ends with the </HTML> tag. Each document is considered to be a single page. Everything is written within these tags. If the commands are not enclosed in tags then the web borwser will assume the commands as simple text. The HTML is divided into two parts: the header <HEAD> and the body <BODY>.

HEAD (<HEAD> .. </HEAD>)

The header is a place where you put the information about the web pages. The <HEAD> contains no text within itself.

TITLE (<TITLE> .. </TITLE>)

The <TITLE> tag must be given within the <HEAD> tag. It contains the title of the document .

BODY (<BODY> .. </BODY>)

Within the <body> tag (command), you may use other HTML tags to add images and/or sounds, link your page to other pages (URLs) on the web, highlight your text by bolding or italicizing it, or change the font size.

Note that all tags must be invoked by typing the tag between two brackets (in other words, <body>). Type the tag in brackets again with a slash in front of it (in other words, </body>) to negate the effect.

Example

Here's a basic HTML code (just write it in any text editor like Notepad and so on):