Module 11: Introduction to HTML
What HTML is
🏠The everyday picture
A newspaper page has a headline, a sub-heading, paragraphs, photos with captions. Before it's printed, an editor marks up the text: "this is the headline", "this is a caption". The marks don't appear in the paper; they tell the printer what each piece is.
📘What it really is
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HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language that describes the content of a web page and what each piece is: a heading, a paragraph, a link, an image, a button.
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It's markup, not programming. It doesn't make decisions or do calculations; it labels content.
- Every web page has three layers, which this level teaches in order:
- HTML: the content and its structure (Modules 11–13);
- CSS: how it looks (Modules 14–16);
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JavaScript: how it behaves (Modules 17–20).
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The browser reads the HTML file (you saw it arrive in the Network tab in Module 6) and turns it into the page you see.
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With AI: AI writes HTML very well. Knowing what it means lets you check that a page is structured properly, readable by screen readers, and understood by search engines.
🖱️Try it
Open any website, right-click the page and choose View page source. Scroll through it. You'll see text you
recognise from the page, wrapped in words inside angle brackets, like <h1> and <p>. That's HTML.
✅Quick check
Is HTML a programming language?
Show the answer
No. It's a markup language: it describes what content is, but doesn't make decisions or calculate.
Which layer of a web page decides that a button is blue?
Show the answer
CSS. HTML says it's a button; CSS says how it looks.