What is HTML?

What is HTML?

HTML is a markup language used to describing the simplest form of webpages. It is the main markup language for webpages. HTML is an abbreviation and stand for HyperText Markup Language. When a webbrowser such as Internet Explorer, FireFox or Chrome displays a webpage, what it is actually doing is reading and interpreting a HTML document. This document could be as short as 10 lines or as long as several hundred, the browser does not care – all it does is read your document.

And this is the main purpose of the HTML – to make the content of the HTML-document accessible to the webbrowsers. Aside from making your content accessible to the webbrowser, HTML also add semantics to you content – this means that the webbrowsers and search engines knows what type of content you’ve put up on your webpage and hereby they know how to handle the content.

Basically, the purpose of HTML is to add meaning to your webpages (some believe that HTML is supposed to affect the look of your webpage, but that is mostly a question of religion and we will look into it later on) so that the browser can show.

And what is HTML5?

Then what is the difference between regular HTML and HTML5? We will look into this question throughout the tutorial, but one thing that is important to note is, that anything you might have learned about HTML is still valid when it comes to HTML5 – you don’t have to throw anything away.

HTML5 consists of a whole lot of new features and we will look into the individual features along the way. But actually, HTML5 is not the just the fifth version of HTML – HTML5 was originally created by a group of people who was not in charge of the official HTML standard. To understand the coverage of HTML5 is no easy job – the real problem is, that a lot of people use the term HTML5 when what they actually are referring to is "HTML5 and all its related standards, such as CSS3".

In this tutorial the focus will be on the core HTML5 features and who you use them and where they differ from "the old" HTML 4.

When using HTML5 you need to know that not all the new features are supported by all browsers –Different browsers support different features and therefore you will have to do some tricks to make some of the elements of HTML5 work correctly.

But one thing is for sure – HTML5 is the future, that how webpages are going to be build, Apple and Google support a great deal of HTML5 features already, The World Wide Web Consortium has given up their own work of the next generation of xHTML to support HTML5, so let’s get started!