HTML The Skeleton – Required Tags
Welcome to Level 1!
I have a little experiment to show you. Right now, right click your browser window and click the “View Source/Inspect Page” (the phrasing varies on each browser). A text-like page should open up in front of this one. Can you see all the words entered in between those <> brackets? That’s the HTML of the page.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. HTML is the main structure of your site. In web development, HTML is the skeleton of your website; the first language to code with when developing a website.
A majority of all HTML code is written in this syntax:
<p>Hello world!</p>
The <> brackets with the letters are called HTML elements, or HTML tags (both are used interchangeably). The <> is where we add the specific type of data we want to use; in this example, we used a paragraph tag. Notice how the data type is ended with a slash. Whenever we code a specific type of data, you finish the code with the same name tag, but with a slash at the beginning. The data in between these brackets would show on your page according to the tag.
Required tags
When building an HTML page, there are three tags that are mandatory to use:
<!DOCTYPE html> – This tag is important first. It lets the browser know to treat the below code as a website.
<html> – The entire HTML document. We write all our HTML code in between these brackets, and the browser will properly read the code.
<head> – The HTML header. You can add a <title> tag here, and it will show on the browser tag, instead of the page’s file location. Usually, you store CSS and JavaScript here; both we will get to later on.
<body> – The HTML body. The majority of your HTML (such as paragraphs, lists, etc.) will go in between these brackets. The data in between these tags are shown on your browser.
These tags are usually written in this format:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head><head> <body></body> </html>
You can even copy this text to your own text editor. Be sure when saving your page, you save as .html format. This will change your file to an HTML document, which can be read on your browser of choice. Feel free to use that document as your own practice page.