As promised, today I will write about HTML tags in a bid to help us understand (and probably appreciate) websites. If there's something that software engineering makes obvious, it's that human intelligence is special, machines aren't even close to it. Yesterday I hinted at the fact that everything we see on the web is enclosed in tags and those tags sometimes have attributes. A tag is enclosed in <> and the tag name is specified within the angle brackets.
Some tags need opening and closing tags, what this means is that you put <> to begin the tag and </> (along with the tag name inside the angle brackets) to close the tag. Any content found between the opening and closing bracket will be processed in relation to the tag name. There are some tags that don't need a closing tag as they are termed self-closing. Note that as netizens you can't see these tags, the tags are used by software engineers to communicate with the machine that is rendering the webpage so it (the webpage) looks as we want it to.
Two things help the machine to understand that code written is for the HTML of a page; firstly, the file name must have the ".html" suffix, secondly, the page must have the
<html>
</html>
opening and closing tag, anything within that tag is considered HTML code. We have another important tag where we declare some of the important things about the webpage, this tag is called the "head" tag, we declare the language of the page, the title of the webpage (which shows in your browser tab) and we link to the style of the page.
The "body" tag is where things get visible in the sense that whatever is written within this tag is seen by the end-user. Everything you see when you surf the web are things declared within the "body" tag. Within this body tag we have "header", "main", "aside", "section" and "footer" tags. The five tags I mentioned above are among the most commonly used tag, a webpage can only have one header, main, footer, and aside. The "section", "div", and other tags can be used as many times as needed. The four tags I mentioned that can only be used once per page give the page a lot of structure.
Header houses content at the very top of the page, footer handles the content at the very bottom, aside is usually what is used to handle code on the side of your screen, main handles the main content that you're going to interact with on the webpage. Most content you see is enclosed within "p" tags. It's more or less used to define paragraphs, "h" tags are used to define the header (large texts) you see on the webpage, they can range from "h1" to "h6" with "h1" being the biggest.
FINALLY
There's so much that goes into building websites, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive post, it's aimed at giving you a barebones outlook that should help you understand the basics which you can easily build upon to learn more. I will write about HTML attributes tomorrow.