What is HTML and what is an HTML File?

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language,
An HTML file is a text file containing small markup tags,
The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page,
An HTML file must have an html or htm file extension,
An HTML file can be created using a simple text editor such as "notepad" or "Wordpad" (in Windows), "Simpletext" (on Mac).

HTM or HTML Extension?

When you save an HTML file, you can use either .htm or .html.
I think It's a bad habit to use .htm because I'm from the later school ;-D
.htm comes from the past and I would suggest to stick to .html.
If you still want to use .htm, it's fine, just be consistant, and use it all the time.

You can easily write HTML files using "Frontpage" or "Dreamweaver" instead of writing them in plain text of course, however, if you want to learn your primer HTML, use "notepad", and you will also be able to go behind these WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) software as they have a mind of their own and have the tendencies to write useless extra code ("Frontpage" especially).

Here's a tiny example of what an HTML File looks like:

Bellow is what it would look like in your browser... go ahead and try it... copy the content of the above table and past it inside your "Notepad" or other, save the file as "myfirst.html" without the quotes somewhere (just remember where), open your favorite browser, go to "File", "Open File" or "Open", "Browse" for you Notepad File named "myfirst.html".

The first tag in your HTML document is . This tag tells your browser that this is the start of an HTML document.

The text between the tag and the tag is header information. Header information is not displayed in the browser window.

The text between the tags is the title of your document. The title is displayed in your browser's head caption.

The text between the and tags is the text that will be displayed in your browser.

The text between the

and

The text between the and tags will be displayed in a bold font.

The
tag is a brake in your text line.

The text between the and tags will be displayed in italic.

The last tag in your document is . This tag tells your browser that this is the end of the HTML document.

What's the issue with

---

and
?

These are what we call Empty Elements. Empty Elements must have a closing tag, or the opening tag must end with />.

For example,
is not valid; the correct form is

or
...

... And for backwards-compatibility with browsers that are not XML-enabled, there must be a space before the /> (for example,
, not
).

Following are other empty elements:

area, base, basefont, br, col, frame, hr, img, input, isindex, link, meta, and param.

For more requirements described in this section, please visit "What is XHTML?"...

If you have further questions you may want to click on the "F.A.Q.s" button in the Top Menu, and if you cannot find what you're looking for there, click on the "Request a Q&A" button.