⚙️HTML setup

getting that first webpage in

Let us begin with the creation of a basic HTML file!

Prerequisites

To create an HTML file, you could use only a text editor, like TextEdit or Notepad...

...but a code editor, like Sublime or Visual Studio Code, helps a lot!

The minimal HTML file

If we open the text editor, we can copy and paste the below:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

    <head>
        <title>(The title that will show in the browser tab)</title>        
    </head>
    
    <body>
        <p>(The content)</p>
    </body>
    
</html>

  • The first line tells the browser to expect an HTML document

  • The actual HTML begins inside the <html> tag which contains an optional lang attribute to indicate what human language the page uses

    • the HTML continues with the <head> tag

      • this contains the HTML page's metadata (data about the page) with <meta> tags

    • then the <body> tag contains the actual content that the browser displays

Closing tags

  • Most HTML tags come paired with a closing tag

    • In the above example, we have </title>, </head>, </p>, </body> and </html>

    • Tags close in a nested hierarchy such that we cannot have an outer tag close before an inner tag closes, e.g. <body><h1></body></h1> must instead be <body><h1></h1></body>

That makes up nearly the barest-bones HTML page; after that, the possibilities become endless:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8" />
        <title>Page's title</title>        
    </head>
    
    <body>
        <h1>Heading 1</h1>
        <p>This forms a pararaph of some sorts. </p>
    </body>
    
</html>

Self-closing tags

  • Here, we have introduce a new tag <meta charset="utf-8" /> which features a tag without a closing tag that self-closes (we can also call this a self-closing tag)

    • Other tags that have this feature include

      • <link href="..." /> for stylesheets (located usually only in the <head> tag)

      • <img src="..." /> for images

      • <br />for line breaks (like pressing "shift+return" or "shift+enter" on a word processor)

    • Note that it has become optional to include the self-closing slash

      • e.g. it is OK to write just <br>

Finally

  • The optional <meta charset="utf-8" /> tag tells the browser what kind of alphabets (and numbers) the document will use

    • We've included this tag here more to demonstrate self-closing tags than its function

    • We will later look at meta tags in detail

  • We will go over <h1> and <p> in the next page about HTML tags...

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