1. What is HTML?
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It’s the language we use to describe the structure of a web page: headings, paragraphs, images, links and so on.
HTML doesn’t “do” anything like Python. It just tells the browser: this is a heading, this is a paragraph, this is a picture.
3. A full page
Every HTML page has the same skeleton. Don’t worry about memorising it. Just recognise it.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, web!</h1>
<p>This is my first page.</p>
</body>
</html>
<head>is for information about the page (like the title in the browser tab).<body>is for the content you actually see.
4. Text content
<h1>About me</h1> <p>My name is <strong>Sam</strong> and I love <em>skateboarding</em>.</p>
Preview
About me
My name is Sam and I love skateboarding.
5. Links & images
A link takes you somewhere else when clicked:
<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize">BBC Bitesize</a>
An image has no closing tag. It uses src (source) and alt (description for accessibility):
<img src="dog.jpg" alt="A golden dog smiling." />
alt attribute. It helps people who use screen readers, and shows if the image fails to load.
6. Lists
<ul> <li>Football</li> <li>Chess</li> <li>Drawing</li> </ul>
Use <ul> for bullet points and <ol> for numbered lists. Each item goes in an <li>.
Mini project: About Me page
Open a text editor (VS Code, Notepad, or TextEdit). Save a new file called about.html and try to build a page with:
- A heading with your name
- A paragraph saying one thing you like
- A bulleted list of 3 hobbies
- A link to your favourite website
Open the file in a browser to see the result. Every website started like this!