What is HTML?

Quick reference

• 00:05 In this video I wanna talk for
• 00:06 just a couple of minutes on some very basic concepts.
• 00:09 So, what is HTML?
• 00:12 HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, HTML, and
• 00:16 it seems like a computer programming language, but it's actually not.
• 00:19 It's actually just a markup language and that means,
• 00:22 what we're doing is we're taking text, any text, and we're marking it up.
• 00:26 We're doing something to it to change it a little bit.
• 00:29 When you think of computer programming languages you think of stuff like this.
• 00:34 It looks very computery, there's weird things, and dots and
• 00:40 symbols, and there's logic involved, and that's really computer code.
• 00:45 HTML kinda looks like that, but it doesn't have any of this logic, it doesn't have
• 00:48 any of the standard things that you see in other computer programming languages.
• 00:52 But we sort of lump it in with the rest of the computer programming languages because
• 00:56 it's so fundamental.
• 00:58 And if we right-click on any web page, like I mentioned earlier, and
• 01:01 click view page source, we see, it looks like code.
• 01:05 It looks like computer code.
• 01:06 There's some weird symbols, these bracketed things, but it's just,
• 01:09 it's not computer code.
• 01:10 And we can see before we get in any of those,
• 01:13 you can see how we're marking up the text, we're wrapping it in these tags and
• 01:18 see right here, Senior Full Stack Web Developer,
• 01:22 is wrapped around these two tags, strong and strong.
• 01:25 Well we'll learn later that the strong tag makes something bold and then we get this.
• 01:30 So what we're just doing, basically, with all HTML, is just marking up text, and
• 01:35 that's why its called hypertext markup language.
• 01:37 So its pretty simple compared to other programming languages.
• 01:41 You can pick it up really quickly.
• 01:43 It's really just a matter of learning all of the tags because you're wrapping things
• 01:47 in tags and you just kinda memorize all the tags.
• 01:49 So before we get into and start learning these things,
• 01:52 I wanna spend just another minute talking about the structure of the Internet.
• 01:56 How does the Internet work?
• 01:57 Have you ever actually sat down and thought about, when I go to a web page,
• 02:00 and I type into my web browser, what happens?
• 02:04 Well, basically, when you type something into your web browser here.
• 02:07 It goes out something called a name server and it finds the address of the website
• 02:11 and it comes back and it says go to this address and it's a long
• 02:16 number like 156.192.46.52 and our computers interpret that as johnelder.org.
• 02:21 But what happens next is your web browser here goes to that address.
• 02:25 And it says, hey, we want to see this web page, and it interacts with something
• 02:29 called a web server, and there are lots of different web servers depending on
• 02:32 the backend computer languages you're using and your development stack.
• 02:37 Were not going to get into all of that because that's beyond the scope of this
• 02:40 course but the web server then sends back this thing.
• 02:44 If you look at the view page source, it sends back this HTML file.
• 02:48 And then the web browser takes this, takes all this code, and it interprets it and
• 02:52 then it pops out on the screen this.
• 02:55 So it converts all of these tags.
• 02:59 These open and close tags.
• 03:00 It marks up all of the text.
• 03:02 It makes it look the way it's supposed to look and then we get this.
• 03:05 So, in the world of web development, there's front-end development and
• 03:08 back-end development.
• 03:09 And HTML is considered a front-end development tool.
• 03:13 It's the stuff on the front-end, the things that humans see.
• 03:16 The back-end is mostly, think of it as, things that the computer sees.
• 03:19 Back end stuff is web servers, databases,
• 03:22 the hardcore programming languages, Ruby, Python, things like that, PHP.
• 03:27 That's all done on the back-end.
• 03:28 The front end is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
• 03:32 And we're not gonna be talking about JavaScript too much in this course.
• 03:35 We'll reference it a couple of times, but we'll touch a little bit on CSS.
• 03:38 And really, those three things work together, HTML, CSS, and
• 03:42 JavaScript, to give us the front-end stuff we see whenever we go to any website.
• 03:47 So just take a minute to sort of think about that, how the interaction works.
• 03:50 The web browser renders up the HTML document, which is this thing.
• 03:55 It converts all the tags into graphical user interfaces like we call websites and
• 04:01 web pages.
• 04:02 And that's pretty much it.
• 04:03 So in the next video, we're gonna jump right in and
• 04:06 start learning this stuff, it's gonna be a lot of fun and that's all for this video.

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