Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications. With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, it forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web.

Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document.

HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Tags such as <img /> and <input /> directly introduce content into the page. Other tags such as <p> surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page.

HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript, which affects the behavior and content of web pages. Inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), maintainer of both the HTML and the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML since 1997.

Source: Wikipedia

The basic elements of an HTML page are:

• A text header, denoted using the <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6> tags.
• A paragraph, denoted using the <p> tag.
• A horizontal ruler, denoted using the <hr> tag.
• A link, denoted using the <a> (anchor) tag.
• A list, denoted using the <ul> (unordered list), <ol> (ordered list) and <li> (list element) tags.
• An image, denoted using the <img> tag
• A divider, denoted using the <div> tag
• A text span, denoted using the <span> tag

The next few pages will give an overview of these basic HTML elements.

Each element can also have attributes - each element has a different set of attributes relevant to the element. There are a few global elements, the most common of them are:

• id - Denotes the unique ID of an element in a page. Used for locating elements by using links, JavaScript, and more.
• class - Denotes the CSS class of an element. Explained in the CSS Basics tutorial.
• style - Denotes the CSS styles to apply to an element. Explained in the CSS Basics tutorial.
• data-x attributes - A general prefix for attributes that store raw information for programmatic purposes. Explained in detailed in the Data Attributes section.