What is HTML ?

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a markup language that defines the structure of webpages. It defines how content will be displayed in the web browser. Modern day HTML also makes sure that webpages are accessible to people with disabilities using ARIA.

Semantic Tags

HTML uses semantic tags to convey the meaning of a webpage.

For example: In an elevator, buttons are used in vertical order to convey the floor number. However, this is also not enough for everyone so numbers are added which indicate the floor number.

Semantically writing HTML allows search engines and accessibiliy softwares to understand the contents of a page. Semantic HTML tags can be broadly classified into 5 types:

• Sectioning tags → These tags define sections of a webpage
• Content tags → These tags indicate the type of content within the tags
• Inline tags → These tags only occupy the space covered by the content within them & don’t break the flow of content
• Table tags → These tags are used to define tables in HTML
• Embedded content & media tags → These tags allow media content like audio, video, images, etc to be defined semantically.

Meta Tags

Metadata is data about other data. Meta tags in HTML define the webpage.

3 categories of Meta tags:

• Metatags for SEO → These tags are read by search engines to rank and correctly search webpages.
• http-equiv tags → The http-equiv attribute is essentially used to simulate an HTTP response header. Not everyone has access to their server's configuration. This can be true if you're using shared hosting where the hosting company makes server config changes on your behalf or you just don't have the credentials to access the server's config.
• Responsive meta tags → These tags define the responsive properties of the webpage

Open Graph Protocol

With the growth of social media platforms and people sharing thousands of links everyday, Facebook found a way to display information about a website before a user clicks on the link to improve user experience. Facebook established Open Graph Protocol in 2010. It is a set of metadata rules that allow websites to describe themselves to social networks.

• Examples of og meta tags