We’re going to build web applications. What makes them different from typical applications is the use of HTTP as the main interface. HTTP is, by definition, a protocol for transferring hypertext. So, what does hypertext look like?

This document is hypertext. But also, there’s a whole language which tells the browser how to render the document. It’s called HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

This lesson is an overview of HTML. It aims to familiarize us with the language so that we can later use the HTML specification or references to solve specific problems. We’ll also mention CSS and JavaScript. We won’t cover HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in detail because they belong to front-end development. But still, we need to be familiar with these topics because the PHP application’s job is often to produce HTML documents.

HTML syntax

A simple HTML document looks like this:

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