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What is HTML?

It’s time for education with Emily!

Get some insight into the core elements of my role as a designer!

Photo of Emily Butler

HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is one of the elements that makes up your website. In essence, HTML is the backbone of the way websites are built. HTML tells the web browser how a website is structured. Other coding languages work in tandem with HTML to create dynamic and beautiful websites. Think of it as the first layer. These languages would not be able to exist without HTML. Even further than that, your website wouldn’t exist without HTML!

What information HTML provides the browser:

  1. Page title information to display in the browser tab.
  2. HTML also provides meta information to the browser that gives the browser and search engines information about the page content as well as the language used on the page.
  3. Descriptions about the elements on the page. HTML uses descriptors in its code to tell the browser that this section is the navigation, <nav>, and this section is the page content, <body>. (In fact, I am writing HTML code to tell the browser that those two tags I used as examples for you are HTML so it can display it neatly!)

Nowadays, instead of coding an entire site from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, we use WordPress as an interface to leverage these languages in a way that makes it easy to create websites without any HTML experience whatsoever. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not important! As a developer, I am so much more effective when troubleshooting and writing custom snippets knowing HTML.

 

Side note from the developer: I enjoy writing HTML because it is much like writing a sentence, once you know the structure, you can learn new “words” and create different elements or provide more information to them!

 

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