HTML is a programming language used to construct webpages.

HTML consists of elements which are a packet of information, held together with tags. Tags are placed at the front and back of the element. You've already seen the effects of some different tags already. This small paragraph is held together with <p> tags and the highlighted text used <mark>tags. Another, less obvious tag was the <abbr> tag, which defined the abbreviation HTML when hovered over. Next, we'll look at what's known as a header.

~~Hey, I'm basically a header too!~~

A header is an element that is mainly used for titles. Their sizes go from h1 to h6. Can you guess what tag the last string of text was?

There's a lot of wacky things you can do with text. you can ~~cross out text with <del>~~, put some emphasis on with <em>, or even quote text with <q>. However, that last tag seems redundant doesn't it? Can't we just use quotation marks?

no.

One of HTML's limitations is that text cannot contain characters that are reserved for code. This includes >, <, ", and a couple more. So how in the world did i just show them to you right now? Entity codes let you display any unicode symbol using their preassigned code, including those reserved characters. Another limitation is that just like a lot of other programming languages, HTML doesn't display whitespace in paragraphs and headers. The solution is the <pre> tag:

                                                        HTML is
                                                              Four syllables, which makes it
                                                                                            Awful in haikus.

                                                                  ~A haiku by yours truly.

☆ HTML is
 Four Syllables, which makes it
  Awful in Haikus. ☆

~A haiku by yours truly.

There's a lot of other things that you can do in HTML that we can't fit into this little page, so here's a list of just some of other things you can do:

Tables
Forms
Buttons
Different types of lists, like the one you're seeing right now.
This list is known as an unordered list, made using <li> tags.
Other lists include ordered and descriptive lists.

But in terms of formatting and making things look pretty we can do some customization with HTML, but to really make things look good we have to use a language known as CSS. In the next section, we'll see just how important CSS is to a website.

HTML is a programming language used to construct webpages.

This is a header!

This is also a header!

I'm also a header.

Me too!

This next one is a header too.

Not the one after this though...

But in terms of formatting and making things look pretty we can do some customization with HTML, but to really make things look good we have to use a language known as CSS. In the next section, we'll see just how important CSS is to a website.