1 HTML OVERVIEW HTML HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and it is the most widely used language to write Web Pages Hypertext refers to the way in which Web pages HTML documents are linked together Thus the link available on a webpage is called Hypertext As its name suggests HTML is a Markup Language which means you use HTML to simply mark up a text document with tags that tell a Web browser how to structure it to display Originally HTML was developed with the intent of defining the structure of documents like headings paragraphs lists and so forth to facilitate the sharing of scientific information between researchers Now HTML is being widely used to format web pages with the help of different tags available in HTML language Basic HTML Document In its simplest form following is an example of an HTML document DOCTYPE html html head head body body html title This is document title title h1 This is a heading h1 p Document content goes here p pg 2 Either you can use Try it option available at the top right corner of the code box to check the result of this HTML code or let s save it in an HTML file test htm using your favorite text editor Finally open it using a web browser like Internet Explorer or Google Chrome or Firefox etc It must show the following output HTML HTML Tags As told earlier HTML is a markup language and makes use of various tags to format the content These tags are enclosed within angle braces Tag Name Except few tags most of the tags have their corresponding closing tags For example html has its closing tag html and body tag has its closing tag body tag etc Above example of HTML document uses the following tags Tag Description DOCTYPE This tag defines the document type and HTML version html This tag encloses the complete HTML document and mainly comprises of document header which is represented by head head and document body which is represented by body body tags head This tag represents the document s header which can keep other HTML tags like title link etc title The title tag is used inside the head tag to mention the document title pg 3 body This tag represents the document s body which keeps other HTML tags like h1 div p etc h1 This tag represents the heading p This tag represents a paragraph To learn HTML you will need to study various tags and understand how they behave while formatting a textual document Learning HTML is simple as users have to learn the usage of different tags in order to format the text or images to make a beautiful webpage World Wide Web Consortium W3C recommends to use lowercase tags starting from HTML 4 HTML Document Structure A typical HTML document will have the following structure Document declaration tag Document header related tags Document body related tags html head head body body html We will study all the header and body tags in subsequent chapters but for now let s see what is document declaration tag The DOCTYPE Declaration pg 4 2 HTML BASIC TAGS HTML The DOCTYPE declaration tag is used by the web browser to understand the version of the HTML used in the document Current version of HTML is 5 and it makes use of the following declaration There are many other declaration types which can be used in HTML document depending on what version of HTML is being used We will see more details on this while discussing DOCTYPE tag along with other HTML tags Any document starts with a heading You can use different sizes for your headings HTML also has six levels of headings which use the elements h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 and h6 While displaying any heading browser adds one line before and one line after that heading DOCTYPE html Heading Tags Example DOCTYPE html h5 This is heading 5 h5 h6 This is heading 6 h6 title Heading Example title h1 This is heading 1 h1 h2 This is heading 2 h2 h3 This is heading 3 h3 h4 This is heading 4 h4 This will produce the following result html head head body body html pg 5 The p tag offers a way to structure your text into different paragraphs Each paragraph of text should go in between an opening p and a closing p tag as shown below in the example Paragraph Tag Example DOCTYPE html title Paragraph Example title p Here is a first paragraph of text p p Here is a second paragraph of text p p Here is a third paragraph of text p This will produce the following result Here is a first paragraph of text Here is a second paragraph of text html head head body body html pg 6 Here is a third paragraph of text pg 7 HTML Line Break Tag Whenever you use the br element anything following it starts from the next line This tag is an example of an empty element where you do not need opening and closing tags as there is nothing to go in between them The br tag has a space between the characters br and the forward slash If you omit this space older browsers will have trouble rendering the line break while if you miss the forward slash character and just use br it is not valid in XHTML Example DOCTYPE html html head head body p Hello br Thanks br Mahnaz p body html title Line Break Example title You delivered your assignment on time br This will produce the following result Hello You delivered your assignment on time Thanks Mahnaz Centering Content pg 8 You can use center tag to put any content in the center of the page or any table cell HTML Example DOCTYPE html html head head body center center body html title Centring Content Example title p This text is not in the center p p This text is in the center p This will produce the following result This text is not in the center title Horizontal Line Example title Example DOCTYPE html html head head pg 9 This text is in the center Horizontal Lines Horizontal lines are used to visually break up sections of a document The hr tag creates a line from the current position in the document to the right margin and breaks the line accordingly For example you may want to give a line between two paragraphs as in the given example below p This is paragraph one and should be on top p p This is paragraph two and should be at bottom p This will produce the following result This is paragraph one and should be on top This is paragraph two and should be at bottom body hr body html Again hr tag is an example of the empty element where you do not need opening and closing tags as there is nothing to go in between them The hr element has a space between the characters hr and the forward slash If you omit this space older browsers will …