HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is a markup language that describes the structure and semantic meaning of web pages. Web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome interpret the HTML code and use it to render output. Unlike Python, JavaScript and other programming languages, markup languages like HTML don't have any logic behind them. Instead, they simply surround the content to convey structure and meaning.
Every web page you've ever visited is structured using HTML code. Being able to read and understand an HTML document is an incredibly useful tool in a data scientist's toolbox.
You will be able to:
- Explain what HTML is and why it's important in the context of web development
- Compare and contrast HTML tags
- Create an HTML document with appropriate tags
HTML makes use of tags which are interpreted by web browsers to affect how content is displayed. The p
tag to define a paragraph is shown below:
<p>Hello World</p>
Elements, like the p
tags above, won't be displayed in the browser. Technologists might say that
the tags "affect how the content is rendered by the browser."
You can also alter any number of attributes inside of the opening tags. For
example, the a
element, which is used for links, has an href
attribute to
specify the destination address of the link. If you wanted to link to
www.flatironschool.com, you could do so as follows:
<a href="http://www.flatironschool.com">Flatiron School</a>
This would render as:
You can also nest elements inside of each other. To have a link displayed as a
separate paragraph, we could nest an a
element inside of a p
.
<p>This <a href="http://www.google.com">link</a> will be a part of a separate paragraph.</p>
All HTML documents begin with a "doctype declaration" tag, which tells the web browser which version of HTML to use. HTML is a language that is currently evolving โ just like English. When you open a novel such as "Romeo and Juliet," your expectation is that the "doctype" is "Elizabethan English." In the same way "Elizabethan English" has changed to a more modern form, HTML 1.0 was essentially the same as modern HTML5 but had some tags that are no longer used and was lacking some tags often used today.
Since it's not wrapping any content, the doctype declaration doesn't require a
closing tag. To use HTML5, the current up-to-date version, you can simply
declare <!DOCTYPE html>
.
<!DOCTYPE html>
Next, you add an opening and closing html
tag. This tells the web browser to
interpret everything inside the tags as HTML code.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
</html>
Every HTML page is made up of two primary sections: a head
and a body
. The
head
element contains metadata about the HTML document and other information
for the browser, while the body
element contains the actual content.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<!-- metadata about the HTML document as a whole -->
</head>
<body>
<!-- content of our page will be here! -->
</body>
</html>
Let's also take a brief moment to recognize how to add comments into an HTML document. These won't get rendered to the browser at all: they're just helpful notes for the author.
<!-- NYC Pizza is world-famous, cheap, and loved by both vermin and human-like! -->
<p>Top 5 Pizza Places in NYC</p>
You've already looked at some common HTML elements, such as a
and p
. Let's
take a look at some more HTML elements.
HTML gives us access to different header elements, ranging from h1
to h6
,
with h1
being the largest and h6
being the smallest.
<h1>Dogs!</h1>
<h3>Why Dogs are Great</h3>
<h6>Different Breeds</h6>
In addition to changing how the text is displayed, search engines use headers to help determine what a web page is about. Remember when you provide semantic markup, machines can infer the "main points" of a page. A well structured article will generally have its principal arguments bracketed by low-number header tags -- this very document does exactly that!
You can embed images on our web pages using the img
element. The img
element
doesn't have a closing tag. The src
attribute tells the browser where to find
the image. The alt
attribute will be displayed if an image can't be loaded,
and also describes the image to search engines.
The alt
tag presents a moment to talk about an important principle behind Tim
Berners-Lee's vision for the Web: it is inclusive. If you're using assistive
technologies because you have a sight impairment, it's helpful to know what's
being displayed. If you're in a remote community where internet access is
expensive, you might choose to disable images and only pay to download those
which you absolutely need. So while an img
will inject an image and "work,"
honoring the Web's vision for openness and inclusivity requires that you provide
the alt
tag as well.
<img src="" alt="Picture of a Dog">
Some other useful HTML elements are lists. You can make bulleted, or unordered
lists, using opening and closing ul
tags. Inside, you can nest a li
, or
"list item" element for each item on our list.
<h5>My Favorite Things in No Particular Order</h5>
<ul>
<li>Coffee</li>
<li>Vinyl Records</li>
<li>Pickling</li>
</ul>
This would render as:
- Coffee
- Vinyl Records
- Pickling
You can also make a numbered, or ordered list, using an ol
tag.
<h5>Top 5 Pizza Places in NYC</h5>
<ol>
<li>DiFara Pizza</li>
<li>Lucali's</li>
<li>Sal and Carmine's</li>
<li>Juliana's</li>
<li>Joe's</li>
</ol>
Would render as:
- DiFara Pizza
- Lucali's
- Sal and Carmine's
- Juliana's
- Joe's
Welcome to the world of the web! In this lesson, you learned about HTML, why it's important in web development, and how web pages are structured. You also compared and contrasted a few common HTML tags as well as saw how tags can be used to construct HTML documents.