HTML Review

We'll use this content to practice some basic HTML and CSS. Specifically, we'll cover:

What's an HTML element?

Also referred to as as tags, HTML elements are special words enclosed in brackets that provide formatting and structure information for a document that will be displayed through software such as a Web browser.

Some people refer to HTML as code, or even programming, though it's really more of a "light" form of code known as Markup. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. When HTML is applied to a document, that process is known as "marking up" the document.

A typical HTML element has the following components:

A word, known as the name of the element (such as p, strong, h1 and so on)
Brackets enclosing the element name. These brackets are the "less than" and "greater than" symbols, like so: < and >
The element's name and the brackets are combined to form tags. Every element has an opening tag: <strong>
After the opening tag of many elements is the content of that element. Content can be text or other HTML elements.
Most elements also have a closing tag, which look like these: </strong>
Put those all together and you have an HTML element: <strong>POW!</strong> or <h1>Heading</h1>
Elements can also have attributes, which are added into the opening tag: <p class="intro">A paragraph with a class attribute.</p>
And some elements are "self closing", consisting only of an opening tag with a slash before its end bracket.<img src="imagename.jpg" />

HTML Element Functions
There are many HTML elements available for use, which can be grouped by the functions they perform:

Basic elements for defining an HTML document
Formatting text
Creating lists
Creating tables of information
Creating interactive areas, such as forms
Linking to other documents or files
Creating structure for layout
Adding images
Adding Cascading Style Sheets
Adding meta information to the document
Embedding scripts and multimedia objects

Also see: HTML Elements Ordered by Function (link article title to http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_byfunc.asp)

Semantic Markup
Put simply, semantic markup is using HTML elements for their intended purposes. It's a process that involves analysis of the content being marked up, making decisions about which elements are best suited for the different parts of a document, and applying those elements appropriately.
A good overview of semantic markup can be found here. (link the word "here" to http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/html-css/semantic-html)