Using HTML to create websites
All web pages on the internet are created using a language called HTMLHyperText Markup Language. The language used to write and display web page documents. (HTML). HTML describes:
- what information appears on a webpage
- how it appears on the page (formatting)
- any links to other pages or sites
HTML can be written in specialist software, or in a simple text editor like Notepad. As long as the document is saved with the file formatsThe way that a specific file type is saved, eg. a picture file is different from a text document. Different file formats have different file extensions, eg. *.jpg or *.txt). ‘.html’ it can be opened and viewed as a webpage from a browser. This example HTML code displays a message on a webpage:
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello world</h1>
<p>This is my first webpage</p>
</body>
</html>
The code uses tags to describe the appearance of the information:
<html>
states that the document is a HTML document<body>
states that the information appears in the body of the page<h1>
states that the following text appears as a prominent heading<p>
states that this is the beginning of a new paragraph
Over the years there have been several versions of HTML. Each successive version has more tags, allowing the programmer to build more advanced webpages. The latest version, released in 2012, is HTML5.