An introduction to HTML

HTML is where web pages start. If you want to build sites, tweak existing ones, or just understand what you’re looking at in the browser, this is the place to begin.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It isn’t a programming language in the usual sense – it’s the structure of a page. Headings, paragraphs, links, images, forms: HTML is how you mark those things up so a browser knows what they are.

A useful way to think about it is as the skeleton of a website. It holds everything in place. CSS handles how it looks, and JavaScript handles behaviour – but without HTML, there’s nothing for them to work with.

In this series we’ll start simple and build up one idea at a time. I’ll use Visual Studio Code (VS Code) for the examples because that’s what I use day to day. You don’t have to. Any decent text editor will do, and all the HTML will work the same.

Why bother learning it? Because almost everything on the web sits on top of HTML. Once you can read and write it, a lot of other web topics start making more sense.

I’ve been building for the web for a long time, and I still use HTML every day. Let’s get stuck in.