First developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is used to create electronic documents (called pages) that are displayed on the World Wide Web. Each page contains several connections to other pages called hyperlinks. Every web page you see was written using one version of HTML.

HTML code ensures the proper formatting of text and images for your Internet browser. Without HTML, a browser would not know how to display text as elements or load images or other elements. HTML also provides a basic structure of the page, upon which Cascading Style Sheets are overlaid to change its appearance. One could think of HTML as the bones (structure) of a web page, and CSS as its skin (appearance).

What does an HTML tag look like?

  • What does an HTML tag look like?
  • What does HTML look like?
  • What is HTML5?
  • What does HTML5 look like?
  • How to create and view HTML.
  • Which file extensions are used with HTML?
  • Is HTML a programming language?
  • How to pronounce HTML.
  • Related information.
  • HTML and web design help and support.

As shown in the HTML tag example above, there aren’t many components. Most HTML tags have an opening tag containing the tag name, tag attributes, a closing tag containing a forward slash, and the tag name being closed. For tags that do not have a closing tag like , it is best practice to end the tag with a forward slash.

Most tags are contained in a less than and greater than angle brackets, and everything between the open and close tag is displayed or affected by the tag. In the example above, the tag is creating a link called “Computer Hope” that is pointing to the hope.html file.

What does HTML look like?

Below is an example of a basic web page written in HTML with a description of each section and its function.

See our HTML and Web Design help page for a full listing of HTML tags.

Example page

This is a heading

This is an example of a basic HTML page.

The box above contains the key ingredients to a basic web page. Each of the lines are explained below in further detail.

  • The DOCTYPE line describes what version of HTML the page was written in so that an Internet browser can interpret the text that follows.

  • Theopening tag lets the browser know that it is reading HTML code.

  • Thesection contains information about the page, such as its title, meta tags, and where to locate the CSS file.

  • Thesection contains everything that’s viewable on the browser. For example, all the text seen here is contained in the body tags.

  • The

    tag is the visible heading of the page.

  • The

    tag is a paragraph of text. Most web pages (like this one) have several paragraph tags.

  • Contained in the paragraph is the tag that bolds the word example in the paragraph.

  • Finally, the closing tags wrap each of the above tags.

  • See our HTML and Web Design help for a full listing of HTML tags.

What is HTML5?

HTML5 is the update made to HTML from HTML4 (XHTML follows a different version numbering scheme). It uses the same basic rules as HTML4, but adds some new tags and attributes which allow for better semantics and for dynamic elements that are activated using JavaScript. New elements include:

,