My First Heading

My first paragraph.

Try it yourself » Example Explained The DOCTYPE declaration defines the document type The text between and describes the web page The text between and is the visible page content The text between

and

is displayed as a heading The text between

and

is displayed as a paragraph The declaration is the doctype for HTML5. What is HTML? HTML is a language for describing web pages. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language HTML is a markup language A markup language is a set of markup tags The tags describes document content HTML documents contain HTML tags and plain text HTML documents are also called web pages HTML Tags HTML markup tags are usually called HTML tags HTML tags are keywords (tag names) surrounded by angle brackets like HTML tags normally come in pairs like and The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag The end tag is written like the start tag, with a forward slash before the tag name Start and end tags are also called opening tags and closing tags content HTML Elements "HTML tags" and "HTML elements" are often used to describe the same thing. But strictly speaking, an HTML element is everything between the start tag and the end tag, including the tags: HTML Element:

This is a paragraph.

Web Browsers The purpose of a web browser (such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari) is to read HTML documents and display them as web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page: HTML Page Structure Below is a visualization of an HTML page structure:

This a Heading

This is a paragraph.

This is another paragraph.

HTML Versions Since the early days of the web, there have been many versions of HTML: Version Year HTML 1991 HTML+ 1993 HTML 2.0 1995 HTML 3.2 1997 HTML 4.01 1999 XHTML 1.0 2000 HTML5 2012 XHTML5 2013 The Declaration The declaration helps the browser to display a web page correctly. There are many different documents on the web, and a browser can only display an HTML page 100% correctly if it knows the HTML type and version used. Common Declarations HTML5 HTML 4.01 XHTML 1.0