Sabrina Polin: Behind every web page is a mess of letters,
numbers and symbols that bring it to life. Ever right click
on a webpage and select View Source? The string of odd
numbers, letters and symbols is the HTML source code.
Hypertext Markup Language or HTML is a text based approach
to describing a structure of a web page's content. HTML
tells a browser like Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari, how
to display the text images and other elements on a web page.
To specify location and display instructions, HTML relies on
a special syntax comprised of tags or structural commands.
For instance, tags can indicate where a body of text starts
and ends. Every HTML element has an opening tag, content in
the middle, and a closing tag. Because HTML is completely
text based with the code literally just typed out, just
about any text editor can write or edit an HTML file,
including basic programs like Notepad. HTML is native to
every browser, easy to learn, free to use, and can be
integrated with other backend programming languages. But
while it's widely used, it does not have dynamic
functionality, limiting it to static web pages, and requires
separate component creation. Additionally, newer features
might not be compatible with older browsers. For instance,
some newer tags from HTML 5, a recent HTML update, are
supported by some browsers but ignored by others.
