What is HTML? Tags and attributes

Discover what HTML is and learn to recognize a tag and an attribute.

6 min · 3 questions

When you visit a website on your phone or computer, you are using a browser: the program that displays web pages (Chrome, Firefox, Safari...). To know what to display, the browser reads a document written in HTML. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is not a programming language: it does not compute anything. It is a description language that tells the browser what each piece of content is: "this is a heading", "this is a paragraph", "this is an image".

To describe content, HTML uses tags. A tag is a keyword placed between angle brackets < and >. Most tags work in pairs: an opening tag such as <p>, then the content, then a matching closing tag preceded by a slash: </p>. The whole "opening tag + content + closing tag" is called an element. The name p stands for paragraph.

<p>Hello!</p>
<p>This is my first paragraph.</p>
<p>The text goes between the two tags.</p>

A tag can carry extra information called attributes. An attribute always goes inside the opening tag, never the closing one. It is written as name="value": the attribute name, an equals sign, then the value in double quotes. For example, the lang attribute states the language of the content, and the id attribute gives an element a unique identifier.

<p lang="fr">Un paragraphe écrit en français.</p>
<p lang="en">A paragraph written in English.</p>
<p id="conclusion">A paragraph with an identifier.</p>

Knowledge check

Make sure you remember the key points of this lesson.

1. What does the acronym HTML stand for?
   • HyperText Markup Language
   • High Tech Modern Language
   • Home Tool Markup Language
   • HyperText Machine Link
2. How do you write the closing tag of a paragraph?
   • <p>
   • </p>
   • <end-p>
3. Where do you place an attribute such as lang="en"?
   • Inside the opening tag
   • Inside the closing tag
   • After the element, on a new line