What is HTML?

Web pages are made up of text files stored on a computer, together with accompanying images, video, audio or other files. The text files, which contain the main content for each page, are written in a language called HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language.

HTML looks like normal English (or whatever language you choose to use), with extra bits of text called tags included. Tags tell your browser what the webpage should look like, where to put the images, etc. and basically do all the clever stuff on a webpage.

Your web browser reads the HTML and renders the webpage on your screen. You can think of the HTML as instructions for the browser if you like.

One of the best ways to learn HTML is by looking at other people's code and seeing what they did to achieve certain effects. Fortunately, that's easy to do. For any page on the Internet, you can pull up the source which is just the HTML that was used to create that page. In most browsers there is an option to 'View Source' in the View menu. Have a look at the source for this page. See if you can find this sentence and see how we've used tags and normal English together.