What is HTML?

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is the standard language used to create and structure content on the web. Every webpage you visit — whether a simple blog post or a complex web application — is built on an HTML foundation.

What Does HTML Do?

HTML is a markup language, not a programming language. Rather than describing logic or calculations, it describes the structure and meaning of content. You wrap content in tags to tell the browser what each piece of content is: a heading, a paragraph, a list, a link, an image, and so on.

The browser reads your HTML file and renders it visually for the user. It decides how to display headings in large bold text, how to indent list items, and how to make links clickable.

A First Look at HTML

Here is the simplest possible HTML page:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>My First Page</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, World!</h1>
    <p>This is my first HTML page.</p>
  </body>
</html>

Even in this tiny example you can see the key ideas: tags wrapped in angle brackets, a tree-like nesting structure, and content sitting between opening and closing tags.

Tags, Elements, and Attributes

An element is made up of an opening tag, content, and a closing tag:

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

Attributes provide additional information about an element. They are written inside the opening tag as name-value pairs:

<a href="https://example.com" target="_blank">Visit Example</a>

Here href specifies the destination of the link and target="_blank" tells the browser to open it in a new tab.

Some elements are void elements — they have no content and no closing tag. The most common are img, br, hr, input, and meta.

HyperText: The Web's Superpower

The "HyperText" in HTML refers to the ability to link documents together. Before the web, documents were static and isolated. HTML's anchor element (a) lets you create hyperlinks that connect pages across the entire internet. This linked structure is what makes the World Wide Web a web.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

HTML is the first of three core web technologies:

HTML — structure and content
CSS — visual presentation and layout
JavaScript — interactivity and behaviour

Think of HTML as the skeleton of a webpage. CSS dresses it up and JavaScript makes it move. In this course you will master both HTML and CSS.

Why HTML Matters

HTML is the entry point to web development. Every framework and library — React, Vue, Angular, Svelte — ultimately produces HTML that the browser renders. Understanding HTML deeply makes you a more effective web developer regardless of which tools you use.