Introduction

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Juno

Welcome to the HTML handbook! I'm Juno, and I'm so glad you're here. Helping people write their very first web page is my favourite thing to teach, and watching HTML go from a wall of angle brackets to something that makes sense never gets old.

We'll start right at the beginning, with what a web page really is, and build it up one small piece at a time. No experience needed.

Nothing here is ever too basic to ask about, so take it at your own pace and we'll get there together!

Juno

Welcome to the HTML handbook. I'm Ace, and I like to keep things practical. You know your way around a computer, so we'll move at a steady pace and stay hands-on, the way you'd actually build a real page.

Every chapter is the concept, then what to do with it: read it, try it, build it. That loop is how the whole web gets made, so you're in good company.

Juno

Welcome to the HTML handbook. I'm Sol, and I've been shipping web pages for a long time. These are the docs for people who want to know how HTML actually behaves, not only which tag renders which box.

Expect the trade-offs, the accessibility details, and the parts most tutorials skip. HTML looks simple, and the gap between markup that renders and markup that holds up is where the real work lives. Read closely and question all of it, including me.

This handbook is for anyone starting out in web development. HTML is the first language of the web: the plain text that describes what is on a page, from its headings and paragraphs to its images, links, and buttons. Before you can style a page or make it interactive, you describe what it contains, and that description is HTML. A quick word on two terms you'll see throughout: a browser is the program that reads your HTML and draws the page, like Chrome or Safari, and an element is a single labelled piece of a page, such as a heading or a paragraph. Every concept here is written out in full, with depth, examples, and something to search whenever you need a quick answer.

You do not need any prior coding experience to start. If you can type text into a file, you have everything you need for the first chapters, and everything else is introduced as it comes up. HTML is where almost every web developer begins, because every website in the world, however complex, is built on top of it.

The handbook works its way from the ground up. You'll learn how to structure a page and mark up text, how to add links and media, how to give your markup real meaning with semantics, how to build forms that take input from your visitors, and how to make pages that are accessible to everyone and easy for search engines to understand. Each idea is small on its own, and they stack into pages you can actually ship.

The approach here is to explain what each piece of HTML does and why, not only what to type. Anyone can copy a tag from an example and see something appear on screen. The distance between that and building pages that are readable, accessible, and easy to change is understanding what your markup means to the browser, to a screen reader, and to the next person who edits it. That understanding is what outlasts any single project.

JunoHTML is built to last Here's a lovely thing about HTML: it barely changes. The tags you learn today are the same ones professional sites were built on years ago and will still use years from now. So nothing you learn here goes stale. You're building on solid ground.

JunoHTML is built to last HTML is remarkably stable. New elements get added slowly and old ones almost never break, because the web is built on not breaking existing pages. That means the time you put in now keeps paying off, and what you learn here transfers to every framework and tool you'll pick up later.

JunoHTML is built to last HTML is about as stable as any technology you'll work with. Backwards compatibility is close to sacred, so pages written a decade ago still render fine and the vocabulary changes at a glacial pace. That stability is exactly why it rewards learning properly: get the fundamentals right and they hold, whatever framework sits on top of them next year.

Meet your guides

This handbook is hosted by three guides, and you pick which one shows you around. The material is the same for everyone; your guide sets the voice it is told in, and on the pages that adapt, how deep each section goes.

• Juno teaches the beginner track: warm and patient, plain analogies, nothing assumed.
• Ace teaches the intermediate track: practical and build-first, straight to what you actually do.
• Sol teaches the Deep Dive: the mechanism, the trade-offs, and the production details everyone else skips.

Switch guide any time from the picker at the top of any page, or open Preferences at the bottom right to change your guide, language, or font size.

When you're set, the handbook starts in earnest. The next chapter, What is HTML, covers what HTML really is and the small vocabulary of tags, elements, and attributes that the whole rest of the track is built from.

Prefer to learn by building?Scrimba's free HTML and CSS course covers the same ground through five projects and 75+ interactive challenges.→