Master HTML 5 #1: HTML and HTML5 Introduction

This video will introduce you to HTML and HTML5. So what is HTML? Well, HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is the language that your web browsers use to communicate to you what a particular web page looks like. Just like learning any new language, be it Spanish, Chinese, or even English, there's a lot of memorizing as well as learning some basic standards like what a noun is and how it's used properly in a sentence. Well, the same holds true for learning HTML. Instead of nouns and verbs, there are tags and other elements that your web browser uses to put that YouTube video on your computer screen, or those words with bold type or red color on that web page. All these cool things are because of a certain element or tag that makes up HTML coding. Now, there are loads of other languages like jQuery or JavaScript or PHP that that also add a lot of additional cool features to your websites, but they all are laying on top of a foundation of HTML. So what is HTML5? Well, HTML5 is the newest version of HTML, and it has many improvements over its prior versions. Many of the basics of HTML remain with HTML5, but there are a few differences between HTML5 and the older versions of HTML. Like for example, the code is cleaner and for the most part easier for today's browsers to read and interpret. Some of the old tags have been dropped and the newer code is built to more easily work with the new more advanced devices like your cell phones and tablets and heck even your refrigerator. Now a couple of the new tags in HTML5 are video and audio. Now there's a bunch more tags as well, but these are the 2 I'm just mentioning right now. One of the ways that I learned about the different HTML tags was simply looking at the code on other people's web pages. Anytime you want to see the tags or coding that makes a website do what it's doing in your browser, just use your computer mouse and right-click, then select View Page Source, and there you go. At first it might look overwhelming, like the first time you saw a foreign newspaper, You may recognize some things, but most looks like just a bunch of gibberish. The more you learn about HTML, the more you will begin to recognize what most of that gibberish is and what it does. Then you will be able to use those same tags and elements to craft your own web pages. Now here are a few websites for you to bookmark to learn even more about what makes a website do what it does. Of course, there's plenty more besides just these, but these will get you started. This first one is called html-dog.com. There's loads of information here and tutorials on both HTML and CSS. And this is updated as the version of HTML is updated as well. So just because you don't see an HTML5 slapped all over the place does not mean this is old stuff. As a matter of fact, if we scroll down here, come on over to HTML tags, and come on down to the very bottom here. It says bad tags. This will give you an idea as to some of the old, what's called deprecated tags, that don't play nice with other code. Now some of these tags may still work, but they might play havoc with some of the newer coding, so you want to avoid these as much as possible. Another page is W3Schools, and like with HTML Dog, there's plenty of tutorials here as well. And one of the things I wanted to mention too, in the construction of an HTML document is that you got this declaration at the very top of the page. And this tells the browser that this is not a text document or it's not a Word document or it's not a spreadsheet document. This is in fact an HTML5 document. And if we scroll down here even more, I believe anyway, and here gives you a little history of some of the older versions, but that's not what I'm talking about. Right here is what I'm talking about. The common declarations for HTML5. That's what I just showed you. For the prior version, HTML4, it's got this declaration right here. And this is what you're going to see in most web pages today. But that's that. So again, add this to your bookmarks. Another one, and I refer to these on several occasions whenever I'm trying to figure out what a particular element does or how I can get it to do what I want it to do on my website. But this is w3.org. And like with HTMLDog, there's nothing on here that's screaming HTML5, but it is up to date. As you can see right here, the declaration they're using here is for HTML5. Gives a little bit of a history background here and all kinds of tutorials and cool stuff all over the place here. And last but not least, my friend Wikipedia. Now on Wikipedia, there's a lot of additional information too. This is just the HTML page. You can do a search here for HTML5, and we've got a specific page just for HTML5. And if we scroll down here a little bit, you can see right here that you can get additional information on specific elements of HTML5, like the HTML5 for video, which I believe is right here, and also for audio and for canvas. If we just go to video as a demonstration— HTML5 for video— and this gives you a bit more information on some of the pros and cons of using HTML5 video tags right now. In the current state of the browsers not agreeing with one another on a standard format. And there's ways you can work around it here. Like learning a foreign language, the more you practice, the better and quicker you're going to get. That will bring to an end this video on the introduction to Hypertext Markup Language, also known as HTML. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.