All language subtitles for 1. Introduction to HTML

All right. So now let's tackle what exactly is HTML and how do we
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use it to structure our websites.
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So no matter what you use as your browser, it could be Chrome,
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it could be Safari or Firefox.
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They all have a single purpose
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and that's to interpret your files, such as your HTML files,
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CSS files, your JavaScript files into a website that should be displayed.
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For example, we've got a little bit of HTML code here
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that says that our website should have a title called hello and in the body,
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there should be a heading that says hello world.
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So if we pass that code into our browser,
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it will open it up and display it like so with the title of the website
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usually on the top bar and that H1 or that big heading
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showing up in the body of our website. So before we dive deep into this,
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it's really important to remember that HTML is the foundation of all websites.
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So for example,
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you won't see websites that are created using just a CSS file or just a
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JavaScript file, but you can create websites using just an HTML file.
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Now it might not look great. It will probably look like came from the nineties,
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but it does enable
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your website to display texts or various elements such as images or forms or
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tables, depending on how you code up the HTML file.
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So HTML stands for hypertext markup language
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and the really important part here is the word markup
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because there's many markup languages. For example,
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you might have heard of things such as XML, extensible markup language,
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or GML, generalized markup language.
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And all of these languages share a common history. They're based off the markup
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that used to be put into manuscripts where editors would mock up the manuscript
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and either specify changes to the author or specify structure and layout to the
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publishers. So for example,
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you might have the squiggly line that shows the publishers that this part should
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be printed in bold,
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or this part should be printed in italics. And HTML works in much the same way.
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You can specify the layout and structure of your website by using HTML tags.
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So if you had it over to your browser and go to a website called codepen.io,
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then we can have a look and have a play around with real-life HTML.
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So you don't have to sign up,
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just head over to codepen.io and then hit create new pen.
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And then we're going to change the view to a format like this.
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So this is the live version of our website,
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and these are the places where we're going to put our code.
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So as you can see codepen lets you put in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript,
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which will together get interpreted and get shown on the left as your website.
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Now, as we're only working with HTML at the moment,
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I'm going to minimize the CSS and JavaScript sections
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and I'm just going to work from the HTML, um, section.
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Now we're going to need some text to work with
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or to have something which we can give structure to.
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If you head over to gutenberg.org/ebook/1661,
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you get taken to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.
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So one of my favorite books of all time. If you have a look down here,
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you can see that you can view the book as plain text,
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or you can read this book online as HTML.
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So this is what the plain text looks like.
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It has all of the texts in the book,
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but absolutely no structure.
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But when we have a look at the HTML file,
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you can see that it has laid out the book where a structure that is more human
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readable, and this is what we're going to replicate using HTML.
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So if you go ahead and just copy this part,
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the adventures of Sherlock Holmes by sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
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and you copy it and place it into your pen.
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So in the HTML section here. Now,
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you can see that all of this text gets put onto the screen with absolutely no
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structure. And in order for this to start looking like this,
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we're going to start adding a little bit of HTML.
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So the first thing we can see is that this is the largest heading on the page.
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So we can make our website look like that also by adding an h1 tag into our
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HTML. So the tag starts with angular brackets and end with angular brackets
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and in the middle is the type of element or the type of tag you want to use.
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Now,
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it's really important that when you open tags that you also close them because
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as you can see here, I've got an open tag but I have yet to close it
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and it thinks that the entire contents of my page should be made into the
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largest heading possible. And that's not what I want.
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I only wanted for this section, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
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So in order to close the tag, it's the same angle bracket
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but then I have to use a forward slash and then write h1.
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So now only this part is an h1 or a large heading.
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Now, if we have a look at the other parts,
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I would say that this word by is a little bit smaller than the author name.
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So let's structure this as a heading also, but let's make it a subtitle.
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So let's make it a slightly smaller heading. And to do that,
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we can simply wrap this text around an h2 tag.
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And now we have Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a heading,
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but in a smaller size and shown with less important than the big title.
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So no,w finally, we have this word by,
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and I reckon that's one size smaller than this heading.
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So let's go ahead and wrap this inside an h3.
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I hope you're starting to get the gist.
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The heading tags get smaller as the number goes up.
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So for example, if I change this to an h4,
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it gets even smaller, h5, smaller still,
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and all the way until h6
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which is the smallest font size for the heading element. Now,
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if you keep going to h7,
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you'll notice that it doesn't do anything anymore.
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It doesn't change the heading size.
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And that's because the heading elements only go from h1 to h6.
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Now, how do I know that, I hear you ask?
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So this is a good point in the course to introduce documentation.
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And the reason why I'm talking about it so early on is because of how important
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it is to your journey as a web developer.
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So one of the key skills in becoming a great web developer, or in fact,
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any sort of programmer is getting good at finding out how you can help yourself.
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And a lot of that involves getting good at Googling.
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How do you find the specific piece of information that's going to help you
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achieve what it is that you want or help you understand what it is that you want
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to know? So in this case,
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we're talking about headings and we are using HTML,
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and I'm going to add in the name of the documentation that I prefer to use,
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which is MDN and it stands for the Mozilla developer network.
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So the same people who made Firefox, for example. So if I go ahead and hit
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enter, you see a whole bunch of results come up.
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And the most relevant for us is the h1 to h6
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and it talks about headings. So if we click on that,
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you can learn more about the heading elements used in HTML
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and they even have example code snippets that show you what it would look like
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rendered in a browser. Now there's a couple of sources for documentation.
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One is of course MDN, another one is called w3schools.
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So let's see if we tried w3 schools with HTML and we're talking about
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headings, right? Let's see what we get here. So HTML
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headings is the first result that comes up. And similarly,
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you've got the code examples, you've got the results,
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and you've got a little bit of notes that tell you how you should be using your
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headings.
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Both of these places have a lot of really useful usage notes,
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and it's worth reading through when you're first coming across a particular
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element.
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That way you'll have a good foundation of knowledge when you start to build and
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create your own websites. So I want to show you one
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last resource that I quite like using, which is called devdocs.io,
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and this is basically a website that puts together a lot of the useful documentation
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in a structure that I find to be quite handy.
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So if we have a look inside the HTML 5 tab,
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and we go into the elements, we can see that there's a total of 135 elements.
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And if you scroll down, you can see that we've got h1 through to h6.
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And if you click on any of these then it brings up
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actually the MDN documentation
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so you can see that it's similar to what we saw on MDN,
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but it's just structured in a very simple way, and it's very easy to follow.
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So that's definitely a website that's worth bookmarking.
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So if we head back over to our HTML file,
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we're going to change that back to an h3
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which is an HTML tag that actually exists as opposed to something like h
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9.
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So the next thing that we need to do in order to better replicate this website
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is to add some space between these lines. Now in a word processor
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such as a Word or Google docs,
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you'll be able to simply just hit enter a few times or hit return a few times
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and get that spacing show up. Now, unfortunately, in HTML,
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it doesn't quite work like that.
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It's a little bit more complicated. In order to create that spacing,
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we actually have to use an HTML element called a line break and it's written
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like so.
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And the interesting thing about this HTML element is that it doesn't require
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both an open and a close tag.
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So when we had the h1 through the h6 tags,
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you can see that we started out by marking the text with an h1
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and then we closed it off with a closing tag.
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But the line break element works all by itself
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and you can even put it inside, like
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so, to make this part go onto a new line. Now,
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this is a good time point to review the anatomy of HTML tags.