Edexcel IGCSE ICT · Web Authoring
HTML: Structuring the Web
HTML is the skeleton of every webpage — a set of "tags" that tell the browser what each piece of content is (a heading, a link, an image) so it can be displayed and understood correctly.
Think of a webpage like a house. HTML is the frame and rooms — it decides "this is the kitchen, this is the bedroom, this is the front door." It doesn't decide paint colours or furniture style (that's CSS's job) — it just defines structure and meaning.
HTML is built from elements, commonly called tags. A tag is written inside angle brackets, like <p> for a paragraph. Most tags need to be opened and closed so the browser knows where that piece of content starts and ends:
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
Notice the closing tag has a forward slash: </p>. But a few tags are self-closing — they don't wrap around any content, so there's nothing to "close." Images and stylesheet links are the classic examples:
<img src="cat.jpg" alt="A cat">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">
Every HTML page has one root tag that wraps everything else: <html>...</html>. Every other tag on the page lives inside it.
The core content tags to know
Headings:
<h1> to
<h6> | Paragraphs:
<p> | Links:
<a> | Images:
<img>
💡 Analogy
If a Word document used HTML instead of a toolbar, you wouldn't click "Bold" — you'd type <strong>important</strong> around your text. The tag describes the content instead of just styling it.
Practice Question
Q1. Explain why <img> does not need a closing tag, but <p> does.
The head is like the back office of a webpage — customers (users) never walk in there, but it's full of information that makes the front-of-house work properly. It sits between <head> and </head>, and nothing inside it appears in the main browser window. The one exception is the page title, which shows up in the browser tab.
Page Title
The <title> tag sets what appears on the browser tab (and often what shows as the clickable headline in search engine results).
<title>My Web Page</title>
External Stylesheets
Rather than writing styling rules directly into the HTML, developers keep them in a separate .css file and link it in the head using the <link> tag. This keeps content (HTML) and appearance (CSS) cleanly separated — a core web design principle.
<link
rel=
"stylesheet"
href=
"styles.css"
>