What is HTML

HTML stands for hyper text markup language. It uses tags to identify elements so the browser can display it properly. Paired with CSS, cascading style sheet, it can be designed to become much more than simple bare bone sites.

I have a little experience with HTML and CSS from when I was in school and we made a couple websites as part of our ICT class.


Semantic Elements

HTML is mostly comprised of semantic elements. Whilst I am somewhat familiar with HTML this word semantic is new to me, but simply it means ‘relating to meaning’ which is fairly straight forward and lines up with me understanding of HTML.

An example of semantic and non semantic elements would be:

Non Semantic - <Div>

Semantic - <Header>


Page Structure

Each HTML site will consist of a doctype declaration to tell the browser of which version of HTML the document is written in. In line with accesibility guidelines. As well as this the page will be comprised of HTML tags, Head tags and Body tags. Again most of this is stuff I am familiar with, apart from the doctype declaration, that is something I never picked up on and never questioned but its interesting to note the uses of it.

ISO language codes are to be included as we need to declare the language used in the page. To do this we add the lang attribute in the <html> tag.


Head elements

The information used in the <head> tags is used by browsers and search engines. To understand the how the content should be rendered and to display the information about the page in their search engine results.

Charset

Viewport

Description

Page Title