Why to Learn HTML?

Bonish Singla
May 16, 2022
0 Comments

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, which is the most widely used language on Web to develop web pages. HTML was created by Berners-Lee in late 1991 but “HTML 2.0” was the first standard HTML specification which was published in 1995. HTML 4.01 was a major version of HTML and it was published in late 1999. Though HTML 4.01 version is widely used but currently we are having HTML-5 version which is an extension to HTML 4.01, and this version was published in 2012.

Why to Learn HTML?

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.

HTML is a MUST for students and working professionals to become a great Software Engineer specially when they are working in Web Development Domain. I will list down some of the key advantages of learning HTML:

Create Web site – You can create a website or customize an existing web template if you know HTML well.
Become a web designer – If you want to start a carrer as a professional web designer, HTML and CSS designing is a must skill.
Understand web – If you want to optimize your website, to boost its speed and performance, it is good to know HTML to yield best results.
Learn other languages – Once you understands the basic of HTML then other related technologies like javascript, php, or angular are become easier to understand.

Hello World using HTML.

Just to give you a little excitement about HTML, I’m going to give you a small conventional HTML Hello World program, You can try it using Demo link.

Live Demo

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
   <head>
      <title>This is document title</title>
   </head>	
   <body>
      <h1>This is a heading</h1>
      <p>Hello World!</p>
   </body>	
</html>

Applications of HTML

As mentioned before, HTML is one of the most widely used language over the web. I’m going to list few of them here:

Web pages development – HTML is used to create pages which are rendered over the web. Almost every page of web is having html tags in it to render its details in browser.
Internet Navigation – HTML provides tags which are used to navigate from one page to another and is heavily used in internet navigation.
Responsive UI – HTML pages now-a-days works well on all platform, mobile, tabs, desktop or laptops owing to responsive design strategy.
Offline support HTML pages once loaded can be made available offline on the machine without any need of internet.
Game development– HTML5 has native support for rich experience and is now useful in gaming developent arena as well.

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 −

Live Demo

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

   <head>
      <title>This is document title</title>
   </head>
	
   <body>
      <h1>This is a heading</h1>
      <p>Document content goes here.....</p>
   </body>
	
</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 −

Sr.No	Tag & Description
1	<!DOCTYPE…>This tag defines the document type and HTML version.
2	<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.
3	<head>This tag represents the document’s header which can keep other HTML tags like <title>, <link> etc.
4	<title>The <title> tag is used inside the <head> tag to mention the document title.
5	<body>This tag represents the document’s body which keeps other HTML tags like <h1>, <div>, <p> etc.
6	<h1>This tag represents the heading.
7	<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 −

<html>
   
   <head>
      Document header related tags
   </head>
   
   <body>
      Document body related tags
   </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

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 −

<!DOCTYPE html>

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.