Introduction to HTML
What HTML is, how a browser turns it into a page, and your very first document.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and it is the language every browser on Earth understands. Every website you have ever visited — search engines, games, this page — is built on documents written in HTML.
What HTML actually is
HTML is not a programming language. It is a markup language: you take ordinary text and mark up pieces of it to say what they are. A heading, a paragraph, a list, an image — HTML labels the parts, and the browser uses those labels to build the page you see.
Here is the smallest complete HTML document:
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My first page</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, world!</p>
</body>
</html>
Reading the document
<!doctype html>tells the browser "this is modern HTML".<html>wraps the whole document.<head>holds information about the page, like its title.<body>holds the content people actually see.<p>marks one paragraph of text.
Save that into a file named index.html, open it in your browser, and you
have published your first page — no tools, no installs.
Why learn HTML first?
Every technology you will meet later — CSS, JavaScript, React, Next.js — ultimately produces HTML. Learn to read it now and everything after becomes easier to understand.
What you learned
- HTML is a markup language that labels content by meaning
- A document has a
head(metadata) and abody(visible content) - You can write and open a real page with any text editor