HTML: HyperText Markup Language

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the most basic building block of the Web. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. Other technologies besides HTML are generally used to describe a web page's appearance/presentation (CSS) or functionality/behavior (JavaScript).

"Hypertext" refers to links that connect web pages to one another, either within a single website or between websites. Links are a fundamental aspect of the Web. By uploading content to the Internet and linking it to pages created by other people, you become an active participant in the World Wide Web.

HTML uses "markup" to annotate text, images, and other content for display in a Web browser. HTML markup includes special "elements" such as head, title, body, header, footer, article, section, p, div, span, img, aside, audio, canvas, datalist, details, embed, nav, search, output, progress, video, ul, ol, li and many others.

An HTML element is set off from other text in a document by "tags", which consist of the element name surrounded by < and >. The name of an element inside a tag is not case-sensitive. That is, it can be written in uppercase, lowercase, or a mixture. For example, the title tag can be written as Title, TITLE, or in any other way. However, the convention and recommended practice is to write tags in lowercase. Almost all HTML tags require a closing tag to surround the content they affect. For example, /head, /title, /body that are at the end of the content they affect. There are exceptions to this called void elements, and we will learn more about these special cases and how they are used later.

In the next section, let's take a little deeper look at what HTML is and how it is used.

Source: Khalil Abdullah and Saylor University
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