HTML 5 is the current version of HTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.
HTML is one of three important web development languages you will encounter on the web:
- HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)
- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
- JS (JavaScript)
All m-Power applications utilize HTML files, which can be edited from the m-Painter editor. While knowing HTML is not required to customize your applications’ look and feel, having basic HTML knowledge will allow you to perform more advanced customizations to your application.
HTML Structure
HTML in short is the content you see on a web page. Content includes headings, paragraphs, hyperlinks, images, forms, inputs, and much more. It is responsible for defining the meaning of structure of a web page.
Here is an example of a very short HTML page.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>My Page</title>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>All HTML elements are indicated by tags, which start and end with a < and > symbol. For instance, a paragraph in HTML is indicated by the <p>...</p> tags. The text in the paragraph to display goes in between the tags:
<p>My first paragraph.</p>Here’s a full example that I have included from CodePen which shows raw HTML code and the browser output:
See the Pen Untitled by Matthew Espindola (@Matthew-Espindola) on CodePen.
HTML Benefits
If you work with web development at all, you should learn HTML. A basic understanding will allow you to harness more advanced capabilities for your webpages, as well as speed up your development time by leaps and bounds.
Here are some more advanced HTML 5 features to at least be aware of:
- Offline Storage – HTML5 lets developers create web pages that can be cached by the browser for offline access.
- Audio and video playback – HTML 5 allows developers to embed audio and video without the need of additional plugins, such as Flash.
- New Markup – HTML5 adds new markup tags to provide a meaningful alternative to
<div>tags and make your code easier to navigate. Such tags include<header>,<footer>,<article>, and<section>. - Geolocation – Makes location available to any HTML5 compatible browser. HTML5 can find a user’s location and use it to tailor things like search results.
Additional Resources
To learn more about HTML and see additional examples, the Mozilla MDN Web docs are a great resource for getting started. For HTML basics specifically, see here.