What is HTML?
HTML (or HyperText Markup Language) is a computer language used to build web pages. It gives meaning to the content of the web page and facilitates its formatting. Accordingly, it is used in conjunction with CSS to design aesthetically pleasing and well-structured pages. HTML is about content and CSS is about appearance and design. This division of labor was not always the case in the early days of the web. In those days, CSS didn’t exist yet. HTML therefore took care of both the content and the appearance of a web page. If the results seemed sufficient at the time, developments in technology and working methods have made it obsolete in this aspect.
HTML dates back to the 1990s and was developed by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). It is one of the first technologies on the web along with HTTP and web addresses. In fact, these elements are the basis of the web. In order to be able to consult a page, you must know the address of the page, that is the URL. This URL depends on the domain name of the site.
The web browser uses this URL to locate the web hosting server, where the site is located. Then it routes its request via the HTTP protocol. The appropriate server of the web host searches for the requested page among the pages of this site among its files. If it finds it, it also sends it back using the HTTP protocol. The browser, which understands HTML, interprets the data and displays the result on the visitor’s screen. The browser can understand how to present the text of the page thanks to the HTML tags.
What does a tag mean in HTML language?
Tags, the basis of HTML, frame and describe plain text in a web page. They also allow you to add multimedia resources such as images, videos, audio. The whole plain text and HTML tag form an HTML file. However, this file must have an .htm or .html extension in order to be considered as such by machines. It is important to note that the files do not require significant material for their management. Just use the default editors of any operating system to edit it. Then a browser will interpret the file.
Generally HTML tags work in pairs: an opening tag and a closing tag. In this example:
<p>paragraph content</p>
The tag defines “word” as a paragraph. Browsers will therefore display it as a paragraph. There are different types of tags for this purpose. A distinction is made between first level tags, text structuring, lists, etc. Aside from these tags used to structure text and any multimedia resources, some tags are used to include other languages such as PHP and JavaScript, in order to make pages dynamic.