HTML Introduction

Do you need to know HTML even if you don't want to be web developer? 

Actually yes. For example, sooner or later there will be need to convert some reports from PDF, Excel, or some other format into Web Page so you can publish it on Internet on your own site or just enter data into Content Management Systems provided to you by Open Source Community.

Good thing is, there's no need to be perfect in Web Dev. As you gather more experience, it will be easier to find and arrange better solutions.

HTML is a markup language - it's not programming language like Python, JavaScript, PHP, C++, C#, Java and so on.

HTML will help you to structure skeleton of webpage. On top of that skeleton you will apply CSS to beautify your pages. After that learning path, JavaScript will help you to make web pages more interactive, for example with pop-ups.

HTML files are served to users through a Web Server. Web server is just dedicated application somewhere around the world on servers that can host many other applications that provide services like FTP, Telnet, MySQL, etc. Our web browsers are just dedicated applications that will render HTML codes into beautiful interfaces that wee see on our screens when we browse the internet.

HTML tags are special, standardized codes  that goes onto left and right side of HTML element. Between tags, we have usable content that we will see on screens. 

Please note, in the browser, on web page, you will not see tags, just content. But during page load, browser uses HTML tags to figure out how to represent content to you in nice manner.

HTML can provide an only minimalistic page feel. For all advanced stuff we use CSS to style pages better. But, HTML is a must to structure basic positions of elements of the web page. Don't worry about CSS and JS. We will handle it in dedicated tutorials on this site and YT playlists.

HTML files, that represent individual Web pages, are just plain text files with HTML codes in them, plus usable content. They have .html or .htm extension. HTML files are located in dedicated folders on Web Servers.

It's nice to note that before HTML pages, there was services like Gopher, FTP, Telnet, BBS. All those services were used to share data between users, way before invention of Web Pages. The problem was, all those services demanded individual, dedicated, client applications so you can get into servers to download files, read simple text based news, and send messages.

For example, Gopher was used to browse news and informations, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to upload or download files, BBS to meet people online over slow Dial-up connections, IRC to chat, Telnet to control remote routers and servers.

In past, there was a lot of problems with HTML variants, but now we are lucky because a lot of stuff are polished in modern HTML versions.