What is HTML?

What is HTML?

Posted by admin on February 17, 2012 in Web Designer - Comments Off

HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is an essential skill for any Web Designer. Why? Because even though WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors can enable anyone to create a website without touching programming code, the code created is often messy and difficult to maintain. Knowing how the HTML behind the website works is your first essential skill toward successfully developing websites and becoming a successful web designer.

So first things first, what is HTML?

Well as already mentioned, HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Markup languages are not the same as programming languages such as C or Java; instead they are made up from a selection of markup tags. Within HTML these markup tags effectively describe how a website looks and operates. They are the building blocks that make up your web pages.

Tags within HTML fall between angled brackets, for example <html>, and usually occur in pairs with a matching start and end tag such as <h2> and </h2>. It is in between these start and end tags that you will place the content of your website, so as an example:

<h2>This is a title</h2>

The above piece of markup code would display the heading, ‘This is a title’ on your website.

There are many different tags that you as a Web Designer can incorporate into your web pages to achieve the functionality and aesthetic appeal that you desire; however it is not essential to learn them by heart instantly. There are many different guides for web designers and lists of tags online that will allow you to look up tags as and when you need them, though you will soon find yourself becoming familiar with those fundamental elements that occur on the majority of pages. This makes HTML a very easy web language to learn.

Although HTML is certainly the first language that any web designer / developer should get to grips with, it is not an infallible technology. HTML works the most successfully when teamed with other languages, such as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This CSS code can work with your fundamental HTML to style the pages of your website beautifully. JavaScript is another language that can add additional power to your pages when teamed with HTML.

If you are just starting out on your path to becoming a web designer don’t panic! It is not essential to know all of these technologies at once, as it is certainly possible to put together your very first web pages with some rudimentary HTML knowledge, but to become a fully-fledged web designer, learning HTML is the best place to start.

Click here for a basic tutorial in creating your first HTML Web Page.

If you enjoyed reading the above, you may like to read more articles like this in our Articles For Web Designers category.