HTML - Introduction to our tutorials

1st February 2020 | Christopher Pisani

What is HTML ?

HTML is the World Wide Web's core markup language. Originally, HTML was primarily designed as a language for semantically describing scientific documents. Its general design, however, has enabled it to be adapted, over the subsequent years, to describe a number of other types of documents and even applications.

A quick introduction to HTML

A basic HTML document looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <title>Sample page</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Sample page</h1>
        <p>This is a <a href="demo.html">simple</a> sample.</p>
        <!-- this is a comment -->
     </body>
 </html>

Why use <!DOCTYPE html > ?

When DOCTYPE is declared, the browser will know, what code language you are using, to start parsing the data supplied.

When DOCTYPE is not declared, although it LOOKS like it still works, the browser falls in what is known as the quirks mode. This means that the browser will run in a backward compatibility mode, to render the document designed for old web browsers instead of strictly complying with W3C and IETF standards in standards mode. It will most often, show significantly different results, especially from different browsers.

Why use <html lang="en"> ?

The <html> element represents the top-level element of an HTML document.

The lang attribute specifies the natural language of the content of a web page. An attribute on the html tag, sets the language for all the text on the page. If part of the page uses text in a different language, you can add a language attribute with a different value to the element that surrounds that content.