You are more than likely familiar with how to navigate websites. The structure that enables site navigation is called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Hypertext refers to text that links to other content (aka hyperlinks). Markup Language refers to using tags to organize text for a website. All websites use HTML and if you want to code a website from scratch instead of using a website builder (WordPress, SquareSpace, Wix, WebFlow, etc.), you need to properly understand HTML.
HTML5 is the latest version which has become a living standard that is constantly evolving. At the moment there is not going to be an HTML6, HTML7, HTML8 etc. like you see with phone releases. Knowing HTML well sets you apart because you will know proper document structure for your web pages which reduces the chances of messy code.
For the most part if you know what a tag is then you know HTML. All the content you see on a website is wrapped with tags or a tag in certain cases. To be an excellent web developer you want to know your tags so well that you can go to a website and quickly notate what tags wrap what content.
A tag consists of angle brackets < or > (aka less than and greater than signs). Generally you will have an opening tag, your content, and then a closing tag.
<> content </>
The closing tag includes a forward slash between your less than and greater than signs </>.
What gives tags significance is the text between the angle brackets. So if you have a blog post on your website you are going to definitely have paragraphs which means you are going to use a paragraph tag. To type a paragraph tag you add a p between the angle brackets.
<p>This is a paragraph</p>
The p gives the tag significance. It means it is a paragraph. We can call this an HTML element.
There are several other tags you can use which we will go over. Most have an opening and closing tag as I mentioned.
Sometimes you will see only a closing tag being used as an HTML element. The most common example is an image. An image element will have the text "img" between the angle brackets of a closing tag.
<img />
Instead of content between an opening tag and closing tag this type of HTML element uses what is called an attribute instead of content, specifically a source (src) attribute that is a file path or url to an image you would like to display on your site.
<img src='/filepath' />
Remember if you know tags you know HTML. With this in mind we are going to cover important HTML tags you will frequently see on the internet.
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