Elements

HTML is made of elements. An element is a piece of content plus a label saying what kind of content it is: a heading, a paragraph, an image, a list.

You write one as an opening tag, then the content, then a closing tag:

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

The closing tag is the opening tag with a forward slash added. Forgetting it is the most common HTML mistake there is, and it’s the first thing I check when a page looks broken.

There are a lot of them

There are over 100 elements in HTML. You will never need most of them! I’ve been building websites for years and I use maybe twenty on a regular basis.

The rest of this chapter covers the ones that actually earn their place.