Definition

Now I want to tell you something about HTML you should know.

HTML is not presentational. It’s not concerned with how things look.

Instead, it’s concerned with what things mean.

You don’t tell “make this paragraph red” in HTML.

That’s a presentational aspect.

Conclusion

HTML is just concerned with content.

It just adds some predefined styles here and there, like for example with the list. But that’s it. There’s no customization you can do on how it looks, in HTML.

This will be the job of CSS, but that’s a story for another lesson.

Simple example

<p>A paragraph of text</p>

<ul>
  <li>First item</li>
  <li>Second item</li>
  <li>Third item</li>
</ul>

This HTML snippet says that A paragraph of text is a paragraph. And then we have a list of 3 items.

p stands for paragraph, ul stands for unordered list, and li stands for list item.

For each of them, we have an opening tag (like <p>), the content, and a closing tag (like </p>).

So <opening tag> …content … </closing tag>.