If you want to become a front-end developer, one of the most common pieces of advice you will get is to learn HTML. Hypertext Markup Language, abbreviated as HTML, is the foundation of most web pages.

HTML is made of different things, such as tags, attributes, and elements. Our focus will be HTML tags. We use HTML tags to tell browsers how to structure content into headings, titles, paragraphs, images, and so much more. HTML tags are thus like keywords that define how the browser will display or format the content. 

Servers read HTML tags from top to bottom. There is no restriction on the number of HTML tags a web page should have.

  • All HTML tags are enclosed in
  • Every HTML tag performs a different function
  • Most HTML tags have opening and closing

HTML tags vs. HTML elements vs. HTML attributes

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Most people use the terms HTML tags and elements interchangeably. But are they the same? Technically, HTML elements and HTML tags are different. 

HTML tags define HTML elements. To achieve this, content is wrapped using an opening and closing tag name that match the content of the tag we are working with. 

This is an example of an HTML element:

This is a paragraph

is an example of an HTML tag

HTML attributes give additional information about HTML elements in a document. Attributes are found within HTML elements. 

This is an example of an HTML attribute 

 

HTML Tags everyone should know

HTML as a markup language has evolved over the years since Tim Berners-Lee introduced it in 1993. The first HTML version had 18 tags. New tags are added with every HTML version; the most recent upgrade was HTML5 in 2014.

A close comparison of HTML and HTML5 shows that the latter has semantic tags such as

,

, and