Instructor: Welcome back.
Let's now very quickly learn what HTML actually is
and what we can do with it.
So basically, HTML stands for hypertext markup language.
And remember how we learned earlier
that HTML is one of the core web technologies,
along with CSS and JavaScript, right?
Now, HTML is a markup language that we web developers
can use to structure and describe
the entire content of any webpage.
So notice how I said markup language
because HTML is really not a programming language.
It's a markup language
because we use it to describe something.
And in the case of HTML,
we do describe content using elements.
So we have different elements that we can use
to describe different types of content.
So, for example, we have the element
that we already used in the lecture
where we created our very first webpage.
And so we used the element there to create a paragraph,
but we really have all kinds of different elements.
So elements to create links, to create page headings,
images, video, and a lot more,
as you'll learn throughout this section
and basically throughout the entire course.
Then as we also learned in that lecture
where we built our very first webpage,
web browsers, such as Google Chrome,
do essentially understand HTML code
and can render it as a final website,
so a website that we can see in the browser.
Okay, so this is essentially what HTML is
and what we can do with it.
But now, let's just zoom in a little bit
and take a look at the anatomy of an HTML element.
So basically, take a look at the building blocks
of each HTML element.
And again, we are looking at the paragraph element here,
as you can see by the .
And so all of this here is actually the element itself.
Now, an HTML element is usually made up of three parts.
First is the opening tag, which is the name of the element.
So, in this case, it's the
wrapped in the less than and the greater than symbols.
Probably, they have some other names,
but that's how I like to call the symbols.
So it's less than and then greater than.
Then after that,
we have basically the content of the element.
So in this example, that is just text,
but there might be other types of content.
For example, an element can contain in itself
another element, which we then call a child element.
Also, some elements, such as images,
have actually no content at all
and have only an opening tag.
And all of this will, of course,
become very intuitive as we start writing HTML.
This is just so that you know what I'm talking about
when I speak of opening tag or closing tag, or content.
And speaking of the closing tag,
it is basically the same as the opening tag,
but with a slash.
So we open this paragraph element simply with the .
And we then close it with . Okay?
Now, for elements that do not have content,
such as the image element that I mentioned before,
we actually omit the closing tag.
So, in that case, we only have the opening tag,
and that's it.
And we will see that in action, of course,
once we start integrating images into a webpage.
Okay, and that's really all you need
in order to start learning HTML and practice,
which is exactly what we will do in the next lecture.