I hope you enjoyed that title! In case you are confused, let me explain. Today I will be talking about HTML. HTML is a coding language for websites. It stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It gives us the content of the site, nothing more. No colors, how things are arranged, how to make buttons work....those are for the other coding languages, but not this one! This is just a quick little rundown of HTML and how it works. Now lets talk about why I said it's like Hashtags minus the Hash...
In the modern age we know what a hashtag is, I used 3 of them right below the picture. They, however, are completely unrelated to code. I just thought it would be a fun play on words. Now if you minus the hash, you are left with "tags," which are very closely related to HTML. You see, HTML uses a whole system built around things called tags. Tags in HTML are what designates just what it is you are coding. For example, we have a "header tag" designated as an h1. All the number means is that it is the largest size default header, and they range from 1-4. But to make it a tag, you have to enclose the letters h1 in between the
"<" and ">" signs. These symbols tell the browser, "Hey! This code is a new tag!" So the full header 1 tag would look like this, "<h1>" After you wrote a tag, Start typing whatever you want. What you type after the tag will be the text that appears on you're browser website. So if you code, "<h1>Hello, Welcome to my Page!</h1>," the "Hello, Welcome to my Page!" will be displayed as a page header on your site. Pretty cool, huh? Now you might be asking, wait what is that "</h1>" thing? Good question. So an "open tag" means you have started a tag and are openly typing whatever you want it to say....but it doesn't know when to quit making that thing a header (in this example a header...) unless you make a "closing tag" which basically just ends the tag. All you do to close a tag is put a "/" in front of whatever tag you were using, in this case an h1. So it looks like this, "</h1>." Basically think of tags as bookends, and all the "books" in between the tags is the content that shows up on the webpage. So that is how tags work. If you get that, you can easily code anything in HTML!
So now I will go over some common tags. We discussed header tags, "<h1><h2><h3><h4>" but now I will give a quick overview of some basic tags used, along with header tags.
<p></p>- Paragraph Tag: Used to write body text. Long paragraphs on websites are written in between paragraph text.
<a></a>- Anchor Tag: This is used when you want to link to another webpage or location.
<img>- Image tag: Drop in an image location and it will display that image wherever you put this tag.
<button></button>- Button Tag: This will make the most basic website button. If you put text in between these tags that's the text that will be displayed inside the button. It won't do anything unless you tell it to do something in Javascript...But that's a different coding language that I won't get into here. I hope this helps you beginner coders out a little bit. Now you have the tools to make basic webpages! Have fun!