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HTML: The Structure
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All web pages are made out of HTML, in the same way that all physical things are made out of matter.

To be clear, HTML is not a programming language; you can’t tell a computer to calculate 5*3 in HTML. Instead, HTML is a way of defining what content should appear on the web page. Computers don’t understand English, so we need to explain to them what the difference between a title and a paragraph is, when to display an image and where to create a clickable link.

.. highlights:: **To do this, we need to speak in a language computers can understand; we call this HTML.**

**HTML Tags** are the building blocks of a page, like atoms in an object, and like atoms, there are many different kinds of tags that are good for different purposes.

This is how **this sentence** looks in HTML:

.. code-block:: html

    <p>This is how <strong>this sentence</strong> looks in HTML</p>

The tags used above are the <p> tag and the <strong> tag.

Mastery of HTML only requires understanding when to use which tag. Don’t be intimidated, there are only a dozen or so tags that you will see all the time.

Why do we need this HTML structure? We could display everything as a wall of text to the user, but we want our websites to be easy to read and structured into paragraphs, columns, tables, forms and more. We don’t want to be limited to an internet of walls of text, we’d rather have simple to navigate pages full of easy to understand information.

.. highlights:: **The core concept of the web is compatibility.**

The internet is a mishmash of many different kinds of technologies, and no one person wrote all of it. We have many different browsers that all read HTML in different ways. Some browsers allow for more kinds of HTML tags or have extra features available on some tags. Because of this, coders have made the web a very tolerant place.

.. highlights:: **Browsers usually allow incorrect HTML to be shown instead of hiding them, on the off chance that they have a meaning to a different browser.**

We can liken this to different accents of English. America and England share the same language, and can easily talk with each other. Sometimes, however, there are special words and phrases that they don’t share, for example in England the empty space at the back of a car is called a boot, but in America, it is a trunk. As a web developer, you will encounter these small differences and become aware of them over time. It is not required, or desirable to try and memorize all of them.

The next things to learn are how to create an HTML document, and then some basic tags. Continue with HTML: :doc:`syntax`



.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 4
   :hidden:

   syntax
   seo
   forms
   svg
   best-practices