HTML Toturial - AndroTechHacks
HTML Tutorial
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and it is the most widely used language to write Web Pages.
- Hypertext refers to the way in which Web pages (HTML documents) are linked together. Thus, the link available on a webpage is called Hypertext.
- As its name suggests, HTML is a Markup Language which means you use HTML to simply "mark-up" a text document with tags that tell a Web browser how to structure it to display.
Originally, HTML was developed with the intent of defining the structure of documents like headings, paragraphs, lists, and so forth to facilitate the sharing of scientific information between researchers.
Now, HTML is being widely used to format web pages with the help of different tags available in HTML language.
Basic HTML Document
In its simplest form, following is an example of an HTML document −
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>This is document title</title> </head> <body> <h1>This is a heading</h1> <p>Document content goes here.....</p> </body> </html>
Either you can use Try it option available at the top right corner of the code box to check the result of this HTML code, or let's save it in an HTML file test.htm using your favorite text editor. Finally open it using a web browser like Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, or Firefox etc. It must show the following output −
HTML Tags
As told earlier, HTML is a markup language and makes use of various tags to format the content. These tags are enclosed within angle braces <Tag Name>. Except few tags, most of the tags have their corresponding closing tags. For example, <html> has its closing tag </html> and <body> tag has its closing tag </body> tag etc.
Above example of HTML document uses the following tags −
| Sr.No | Tag & Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | <!DOCTYPE...>
This tag defines the document type and HTML version.
|
| 2 | <html>
This tag encloses the complete HTML document and mainly comprises of document header which is represented by <head>...</head> and document body which is represented by <body>...</body> tags.
|
| 3 | <head>
This tag represents the document's header which can keep other HTML tags like <title>, <link> etc.
|
| 4 | <title>
The <title> tag is used inside the <head> tag to mention the document title.
|
| 5 | <body>
This tag represents the document's body which keeps other HTML tags like <h1>, <div>, <p> etc.
|
| 6 | <h1>
This tag represents the heading.
|
| 7 | <p>
This tag represents a paragraph.
|
To learn HTML, you will need to study various tags and understand how they behave, while formatting a textual document. Learning HTML is simple as users have to learn the usage of different tags in order to format the text or images to make a beautiful webpage.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends to use lowercase tags starting from HTML 4.
HTML Document Structure
A typical HTML document will have the following structure −
<html> <head> Document header related tags </head> <body> Document body related tags </body> </html>
We will study all the header and body tags in subsequent chapters, but for now let's see what is document declaration tag.
The <!DOCTYPE> Declaration
The <!DOCTYPE> declaration tag is used by the web browser to understand the version of the HTML used in the document. Current version of HTML is 5 and it makes use of the following declaration −
<!DOCTYPE html>
There are many other declaration types which can be used in HTML document depending on what version of HTML is being used. We will see more details on this while discussing <!DOCTYPE...> tag along with other HTML tags.
HTML - Basic Tags
Heading Tags
Any document starts with a heading. You can use different sizes for your headings. HTML also has six levels of headings, which use the elements <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6>. While displaying any heading, browser adds one line before and one line after that heading.
Example
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Heading Example</title> </head> <body> <h1>This is heading 1</h1> <h2>This is heading 2</h2> <h3>This is heading 3</h3> <h4>This is heading 4</h4> <h5>This is heading 5</h5> <h6>This is heading 6</h6> </body> </html>
This will produce the following result −
Paragraph Tag
The <p> tag offers a way to structure your text into different paragraphs. Each paragraph of text should go in between an opening <p> and a closing </p> tag as shown below in the example −
Example
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Paragraph Example</title> </head> <body> <p>Here is a first paragraph of text.</p> <p>Here is a second paragraph of text.</p> <p>Here is a third paragraph of text.</p> </body> </html>
This will produce the following result −
Line Break Tag
Whenever you use the <br /> element, anything following it starts from the next line. This tag is an example of an empty element, where you do not need opening and closing tags, as there is nothing to go in between them.
The <br /> tag has a space between the characters br and the forward slash. If you omit this space, older browsers will have trouble rendering the line break, while if you miss the forward slash character and just use <br> it is not valid in XHTML.
Example
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Line Break Example</title> </head> <body> <p>Hello<br /> You delivered your assignment ontime.<br /> Thanks<br /> Mahnaz</p> </body> </html>
This will produce the following result −
Centering Content
You can use <center> tag to put any content in the center of the page or any table cell.
Example
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Centring Content Example</title> </head> <body> <p>This text is not in the center.</p> <center> <p>This text is in the center.</p> </center> </body> </html>
This will produce following result −
Horizontal Lines
Horizontal lines are used to visually break-up sections of a document. The <hr> tag creates a line from the current position in the document to the right margin and breaks the line accordingly.
For example, you may want to give a line between two paragraphs as in the given example below −
Example
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Horizontal Line Example</title> </head> <body> <p>This is paragraph one and should be on top</p> <hr /> <p>This is paragraph two and should be at bottom</p> </body> </html>
This will produce the following result −
Again <hr /> tag is an example of the empty element, where you do not need opening and closing tags, as there is nothing to go in between them.
The <hr /> element has a space between the characters hr and the forward slash. If you omit this space, older browsers will have trouble rendering the horizontal line, while if you miss the forward slash character and just use <hr> it is not valid in XHTML
Preserve Formatting
Sometimes, you want your text to follow the exact format of how it is written in the HTML document. In these cases, you can use the preformatted tag <pre>.
Any text between the opening <pre> tag and the closing </pre> tag will preserve the formatting of the source document.
Example
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Preserve Formatting Example</title> </head> <body> <pre> function testFunction( strText ){ alert (strText) } </pre> </body> </html>
This will produce the following result −
Try using the same code without keeping it inside <pre>...</pre> tags
Nonbreaking Spaces
Suppose you want to use the phrase "12 Angry Men." Here, you would not want a browser to split the "12, Angry" and "Men" across two lines −
An example of this technique appears in the movie "12 Angry Men."
In cases, where you do not want the client browser to break text, you should use a nonbreaking space entity instead of a normal space. For example, when coding the "12 Angry Men" in a paragraph, you should use something similar to the following code −
Example
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Nonbreaking Spaces Example</title> </head> <body> <p>An example of this technique appears in the movie "12 Angry Men."</p> </body> </html>
HTML - Elements
An HTML element is defined by a starting tag. If the element contains other content, it ends with a closing tag, where the element name is preceded by a forward slash as shown below with few tags −
| Start Tag | Content | End Tag |
|---|---|---|
| <p> | This is paragraph content. | </p> |
| <h1> | This is heading content. | </h1> |
| <div> | This is division content. | </div> |
| <br /> |
So here <p>....</p> is an HTML element, <h1>...</h1> is another HTML element. There are some HTML elements which don't need to be closed, such as <img.../>, <hr /> and <br /> elements. These are known as void elements.
HTML documents consists of a tree of these elements and they specify how HTML documents should be built, and what kind of content should be placed in what part of an HTML document.
HTML Tag vs. Element
An HTML element is defined by a starting tag. If the element contains other content, it ends with a closing tag.
For example, <p> is starting tag of a paragraph and </p> is closing tag of the same paragraph but <p>This is paragraph</p> is a paragraph element.
Nested HTML Elements
It is very much allowed to keep one HTML element inside another HTML element −
Example
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Nested Elements Example</title> </head> <body> <h1>This is <i>
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