HTML

Developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language and is a language used to create electronic documents, especially pages on the World Wide Web that contain connections called hyperlinks to other pages. Every web page you see on the Internet, including this one contains HTML code that helps format and show text and images in an easy to read format. Below is an example of a basic web page in HTML code.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en"><head>
<title>Example page</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a heading</h1>
<p>This is an example of a basic HTML page.</p>
</body></html>

In the very basic above example are the key parts to every web page. The first DOCTYPE line describes what encoding the page uses. For most pages, unless they are using XML this line will work. Next, the HTML tag begins letting the browser know that HTML code is being used until it is terminated at the end of the page. Next, the head section contains header information about the page, which will almost always contain the title of the page and the meta tags. Finally, the body section is all content that is viewable on the browser. For example, all the text you see here is contained within the body tags.