Web pages are files that are viewed using a browser. They are written in a language called HTML. HTML is made up of a set of elements, or tags, that are used as instructions to tell the browser what should appear on a web page, and how it should be structured.
An HTML element looks something like this:
<html> </html>
Anyone can view a webpage's HTML by viewing the source of that webpage. If you right click on this page, for example, and select "View Page Source", you can see the HTML that the browser is interpreting in order to display the page that you see.
Although HTML is a single language maintained by a single organization, there are many different browsers available, created and maintained by many different organizations. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer are all commonly used browsers. Each browser may render HTML code a little differently, so it is always best to view your HTML files in multiple browsers to check their appearance in each one.
CSS is commonly used alongside HTML to improve the visual aspects of a webpage. Our CSS tutorial explains more about using CSS with HTML to separate a website's content from its design.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language.