What is HTML?

HTML is a "structuring language" giving the browser "instructions" how the content is structured: which areas (letters, words, sentences), e.g. Headings are, what paragraphs are, what is to be output in bold - HTML is not a programming language - it describes how a page should be displayed in the browser (no more, no less).

HTML is not a coding language to make the design of your website, for that we use CSS (coming back to CSS in another tutorial).

What is a HTML Tag?

In HTML we have different instructions (HTML tags) for:

·Different headlines

·Paragraphs

·Emphasis such as bold or italic

·Different enumerations

·and various commands to structure the content

Every instruction has an opening tag <> and a closing tag </>:

If you want to write the following text in bold:

This text is in bold

The instruction is following:

<b> This text is in bold</b> or

<strong> This text is in bold </strong>

HTML gives your browser the instruction <b> (here starts bold) and </b> here ends bold writing.

Three things are important in HTML codes:

1 HTML tags have always a less-than signs, and greater-than signs <>

2 Between the <> is the statement - b here - and like so many things in life this is an abbreviation (b = bold).Accordingly, all commands are abbreviations of English words.

3 All HTML tags are always written in lower case!

Everything has a beginning and an end. So as most HTML tags.

There are some exceptions in WordPress editing, where you don’t even need to use a tag or only one combined opening and closing tag.

Construction of opening and closing tags

Furthermore, there is an opening tag and a closing tag. Otherwise the written text would be bold to the end of the page.

The end tag is almost identical with the opening tag, with the only difference that

after the less-than symbol (<) is a slash.

Note:

Opening tag: <command>

Closing tag: </command>