Lesson 1

In this module, you will learn to use (HTML)Hypertext Markup Language, which is the language of the Web. The following lessons will get you up and running with the basic HTML elements you will need to create your own website.
After completing this module, you will be able to:

1. Identify file-naming conventions and directory structures
2. Identify editors used to create Web pages
3. Identify the HTML page structure and the tags used
4. Explain META tags
5. Define commonly used HTML tags
6. Create a simple HTML page

Along the way, you will also learn the best practices for HTML coding and page design, and where to turn for additional information.
In the next lesson, you will learn file naming and directory structure basics to keep in mind as you design your Web site.

As of April 2019, most front web development is done using HTML5. XHTML 1.0 was the successor technology to HTML 4.0
HTML 4.0 was recommended by the W3C in December of 1997 and became the official standard in April 1998. Browser support was provided by Microsoft in their Internet Explorer browser. During this time period (1997), Netscape's flawed Navigator 4.7 was insufficient when with respect to HTML 4.0 and even basic CSS. Modern browsers however, are a vast improvement. Once HTML 4.0 had been out for a while, the documentation was revised and corrected in a few ways and was renamed TML 4.01, which was the final version of the specification.
Want to know what the syntax differences are between the two? Perhaps you would simply like to understand the basic structure of a web page?
Since the introduction of HTML5 as primary markup language for the web, I would forget about XHTML and start learning HTML5.
This section deals with the high-level concepts relating to HTML and XHTML, rather than the specific elements or attributes. Even if you think you know HTML really well, there may be one or two surprises in this section.
While this reference aims to provide a thorough breakdown of the various HTML elements and their respective attributes, you also need to understand how these items fit into the bigger picture. A web page is structured as follows.
The first item to appear in the source code of a web page is the doctype declaration. This provides the web browser (or other user agent) with information about the type of markup language in which the page is written, which may or may not affect the way the browser renders the content. Most WYSIWYG web editors will create the doctype for you automatically after you have selected from a dialog the type of document you are creating.

Ted Nelson, father of the Xanadu Project, coined the term "hypertext" over 30 years ago, as a way of describing "non-sequential writing, text that branches and allows choice to the reader."
Unlike the static text of print media, it is intended for use with an interactive computer screen. It is open, fluid and mutable, and can be connected to other pieces of hypertext by "links". The term was extended under the name hypermedia to refer not only to text, but to other media as well, including graphics, audio, and video. However, the original term hypertext persists as the label for technology that connects documents and information resources through links.
From the very beginnings of Internet technology, there has been the vision of using the Internet as a universal medium for exchanging information over computer networks. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project aspired to make that dream a reality, but the goals were lofty and were never fully realized. Internet file sharing services (such as FTP and Gopher) and message forum services (such as Netnews) provided increasingly powerful mechanisms for this sort of information exchange, and certainly brought us closer to fulfilling those goals. However, it took Tim Berners-Lee to combine the notion of hypertext with the power of the Internet, bringing those initial dreams to fruition in a way that the earliest developers of both hypertext and Internet technology might never have imagined. His vision was to connect literally everything together, in a uniform and universal way.