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HTML Tutorial

2. Getting started with HTML

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As explained in HTML and other markup languages, there are various ‘dialects’ of HTML. This means that some examples of HTML may be understood by some browsers but rejected by others. The following text, when put into a text editor and saved with a .htm file extension, will usually successfully render a web page that says “Hello World (using HTML)” if the file is viewed in Microsoft Edge. Note that HTML largely ignores page breaks; if you want to include a page break in the text shown to the user then you need to add a <br> element (or a <br /> element if you are using XHTML, which is a modern variant of HTML that involves a cross between classic HTML and XML).

 

<html>

   <body>

       Hello World (using HTML)

   </body>

</html>

 

However, strictly speaking an HTML document is supposed to start with a document type declaration, along the lines of e.g. <!DOCTYPE html> and a header along the lines of e.g. <head><title>Document title</title></head>. So, a better way to create the page shown above is as follows. We’ve added a comment into the document, using HTML comment tags. Comments are not displayed by the browser but can help to document the HTML source text.

 

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

   <head>

      <title>My Document</title>

   </head>

   <!-- Only the text in the body will appear in the browser -->

   <body>

       Hello World (Using HTML)

   </body>

</html>

 

Often, the <html> element also includes a lang attribute, as this can be important for accessibility applications (such as screen readers) and for search engines. With the lang attribute, the first two letters specify the language. If the language comes in various dialects then two more letters specify the dialect, e.g.:

 

<html lang="en-US">

 


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