HTML

A basic understanding of HTML can help you get more out of your digital publishing experience. These guidelines will explain how.

What is HTML?

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, and is the main language to create web pages. When writing HTML, you add “tags” to the text in order to create the structure. These tags tell the browser how to display the text or graphics in the document.

Semantic HTML

Semantic HTML is the idea that HTML markup should convey the meaning of the content and not its appearance.

Semantic markup makes information meaningful to software. And when software can read and make sense of information, wonderful things happen for those of us who use the software...

–A Web for Everyone

The ability for a humans and computers to be able to understand your content is important for a number of reasons:

• Clean - Semantic markup is clean HTML. It is much easier to read and edit markup that is not littered with extra tags and styles. Clean markup saves time and money for all those who interact with it.

• Accessible - Visually impaired people rely on screen readers to read pages back to them. These programs cannot interpret pages very well unless they are clearly explained. In other words semantic markup aids accessibility

• Search Engine Optimized - Search engines need to understand what your content is about in order to rank content properly on search engines. Semantic markup tends to improve placement in search results.

• Repurposable - Describing content in standard ways ensures that other technologies can enhance or reuse the data. A website’s design, for example, has to be able to anticipate the structure of the content to provide the appropriate visual styling.

HTML Reference

• Headings

• Paragraph

• Bold and Italic

• Lists

• Images

• Links

• Quotes

• Cite

• Abbreviations

• Footnotes

• Attachments

Reference

• Read about the importance of HTML Text Fundamentals.