HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is the standard way that web designers markup plain text to create web pages. When your browser (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc.) opens an HTML page it uses the information in the HTML file to display the page with colors, different size text, pictures (images), links, tables, sounds, and more.
Here is a very simple HTML page:
<html> <head> <title>Hello World</title> </head> <body> <p>Welcome to HTML!</p> </body> </html>
HTML pages are made up of HTML elements, this page has two main elements: a head and a body. In the illustration, the head element has a blue box around it and the body has a red box around it. Both of these elements are enclosed inside the black box that represents the HTML page itself.
Note: The line that says <meta charset="utf-8"> is called a meta tag. This meta tag says that this page will use the UTF-8 character set. UTF-8 is a system that can display the alphabets of languages like Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Mandarin and Japanese instead of just the English alphabet.
What is HTML?