What Is HTML?

Every website you have ever visited - the one where you watch videos, the one where you buy things, the one where you read the news - is built with a language called HTML. In this course you are going to learn that language, one small piece at a time, and use it to build a website of your very own right here on Gwecode.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. That sounds fancy, but the idea behind it is simple. HTML is a way of labeling, or "marking up", pieces of text so a web browser knows what each piece is for. You tell the browser "this is a heading", "this is a paragraph", "this is a link", and the browser shows it the right way.

HTML is made of tags

The labels in HTML are called tags. A tag is a short instruction wrapped in angle brackets, like <p>. Most tags come in pairs: an opening tag and a closing tag. The closing tag looks just like the opening one, except it has a forward slash right after the angle bracket.

<p>This is a paragraph of text.</p>

Everything between the opening <p> and the closing </p> is the content of that paragraph. The tags themselves never show up on the page - they are instructions for the browser, not text for the reader.

Why this matters for your website

Right now that might feel abstract, so let's make it concrete. Over the next four modules you are going to write real HTML and watch it turn into a real page: your page. You will add headings, paragraphs, links, images, lists, tables, and even a simple form. By the end you will have built a personal page that is genuinely yours.

You do not need any previous experience for this. You do not need to already know what a "tag" or an "element" is. We will explain every new word the first time it shows up, in plain English, with an example you can picture.

A tiny bit of vocabulary

A few words you will see again and again:

• Tag: the label itself, like <p> or </p>.
• Element: an opening tag, its content, and its closing tag, all together.
• Attribute: extra information added inside an opening tag, which you will meet soon when we get to links and images.

That is genuinely all you need to get started. Let's move on to the next lesson, where you will learn the basic skeleton that every single HTML page is built on.