Have you ever wondered how a website or a web page works?
Well I have.
So I decided to do some research and find out what exactly a website is built.
As stated in a previous post, here, the foundation of a website, or rather, all websites are created based on the structure of this one coding language, HTML.
HTML is one of the foundation languages apart from CSS and JavaScript. What differentiates HTML from the others is it is considered the structural language that creates the content layer of every webpage.
But What Does HTML Stand For Anyway?
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.
Wait, what exactly does Hyper Text Markup Language mean anyway? So let’s break down these words.
Before we can even breakdown the words let’s breakdown the idea of what a website is to better understand how HTML plays a significant role.
Let’s think of a website as a book. Within a book it is written and filled with many pages to make the entire book.
The same idea goes for a website. The different “pages” that are linked together through HTML create one site, or “book”, on the web.
So simply put, a website is made up of different webpages.
Therefore Hypertext, in the world of web, refers to how the text in a document is linked together to different pages to create the page.
The hyper in hypertext usually refers to a linking system i.e. hypertext href or hyper reference, and so on.
The Markup Language is how the language (or content) is marked in order for the document to be recognized by the web browser.
For example, when creating a title of an article along with the information on the subject, they need to be identified in some way.
This way of identification are by elements called tags. So, for the heading of the article you would surround the name of the article with heading tags.
Ex. <h1>Heading</h1>
Tags are used for separating other content as well such as paragraphs, links, and images within the document.
There are many tags that can be used to specify different elements.
If there were no markup language to separate the content or text within the document, then there would be no structure to a website.
What would be seen on the web browser is one long paragraph smashed together.
HTML is vital for your basic foundation of learning or designing any website or webpage.
It is important to learn what it is and how it works.
Currently the web has updated from HTML to using HTML5.
There are differences with these upgrades which I will explore in another post but for now I wanted to know what HTML is and how does it play a role as a Front End Web Developer.
But with the web constantly updating and upgrading the question to be asked really is…
What’s Next?