Your first HTML

HTML is written by wrapping text in <tagname> and </tagname>.

• <h1>...</h1> … the biggest heading
• the closing one has a / on it

A set like that is called an element.

Ordinary text goes in <p> (paragraph).

Line up several elements and they show up in order, from the top.

Heading tags run from <h1> to <h6>, six levels in all. The bigger the number, the smaller the heading.

It is the same idea as the big, medium and small headlines in a newspaper.

It is tempting to think about "how it looks" first, but HTML's job is to say what each piece of text is. Looks come later, from CSS.

Write <h1> and it correctly tells the browser, screen readers used by people who cannot see the page, and search engines alike, "this is a heading." There are other ways to just make text bigger, but none of them say "this is a heading" the way a real heading tag does.

Browsers try hard to show something even from broken HTML. Forget a </p> and the page often still looks mostly fine.

Don't lean on that, though. Pile up enough missed closing tags and you lose track of where one element ends and the next begins. Make a habit of always closing what you opened.

From here you write for yourself. The HTML you write shows up in the preview just below.

Keep the rhythm going: write, look, fix.