HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It’s the language that browsers speak. Browsers are things like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. We still use English or Chinese or whatever language you speak to write on the page, but behind the scenes, we are marking up that writing with HTML. We’re making it hyper, adding more to it. We add links, color, sizing, spacing.
You are going to make your first webpage right now.
Open Notepad on your computer (TextEdit if on a Mac). To find Notepad, click the Windows button in the corner to open the menu and just start typing notepad. Click on it once it comes up. It’s a text editor. It’s a place where you can write text, words, nothing fancy, nothing special. It’s preferred to something like Word because it is simple and not adding its own thoughts to the page with any automatic formatting.
When we write in HTML, we write everything in tags. To write tags, we use the greater than/less than symbols. < >
We start HTML documents with HTML tags. We open the tag like this.
<html>
Any tag we open, we need to close. We close the tag like this.
</html>
You use the same word in there, but it starts with a back slash.
Anything between those tags is part of the HTML tag. Whatever applies to the HTML tag, applies to whatever is between those. You’ll write all of your HTML between those tags.
Now, let’s write something, otherwise our page will be blank. Your browser doesn’t publish the tags. That’s its private language just for itself, not for sharing.
Write something between your opening and closing tags.
Save your file as something.html . That html is important! We don’t want a text file. We want a Hypertext Markup Language file so that the browser knows how to read it. I suggest making a folder called Projects, maybe one inside that called Lessons. Then you can call this lesson1.html. Keep lesson1 just like that with no spaces. We don’t uses spaces in names in coding.
Now open your documents folder and find your new file. Click and drag it to your browser and drop it at the top of your browser in the new tab position. Voila! You should see an empty white page with only the text you wrote between the tags.
You can see this done in the video.