First steps in HTML ⛰

HTML is a language you use to create web pages. Today, we'll create a web page that says "Hello world" in big letters.

#0 Elements & tags

When you write HTML code, you write one or more elements, e.g. (<body>). These are also called tags, although the < is also a tag so it can get confusing. In this course we'll thus use element to mean <body> and tag to mean < and >.

There are two kinds of elements: block level elements that can contain other elements (e.g. <html>) and inline elements that only can contain text (<h1>).

#1 Create a file called hello.html

In your editor, create a new file and call it hello.html.

#2 Add the html element

<html>

</html>

#3 Add the body element

<html>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

#4 Finally, add the h1 element.

The h stands for headline and 1 means it's the biggest headline. There are also <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5> and <h6> for smaller headlines, just like you have in your document processor:

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello world</h1>
  </body>
</html>

That's it. You can now open your browser, e.g. Firefox, and open the hello.html file to view the result. Congratulations, you've now made your first web page!

Counting from zero 🎭

Did you notice above that the first item was numbered 0 rather than 1? This is common coding humour. In computer science, many thing start with 0 instead of 1 and coders like to use 0 as the first item when writing emails, chats or posters too.