Lesson 3 of 30

HTML Basic

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Every HTML page follows the same basic structure. Once you learn it, you can read any web page's code and understand where things belong.

The five parts of a page

<!DOCTYPE html> — the first line. It tells the browser: this is an HTML5 document. It is not a tag; it is a declaration.
<html> — the root element. Everything on the page sits inside it.
<head> — information about the page: the title, the character set, links to CSS. Nothing inside the head is shown on the page itself.
<title> — the text that appears on the browser tab. It sits inside the head.
<body> — everything the visitor actually sees: headings, text, images, links, buttons.

How tags work

Most tags come in pairs: an opening tag like <h1> and a closing tag like </h1>. The content sits between them. A few tags, like <br> and <img>, have no closing tag — they are called empty elements.

Tip: Always close the tags you open, and keep them nested properly — a tag opened inside another tag must close before the outer one closes.

Example

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>

<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>

</body>
</html>

Output

Output — how it looks in the browser

Try it yourself: copy the code above into a file named test.html, open it in your browser, and change the text to see what happens. That is how you learn — by changing things and watching the result.

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