Well, all that historical stuff is nice, but how do you start coding HTML pages?
As I said, HTML is a markup tool. To mark up your text, you use tags and elements. The element is the basic building block of HTML markup. Usually, an element involves an opening tag and a closing tag. For example, if you want something to be a top-level header, you would mark up the text as follows:
<h1>My First Web Page</h1>
In this example, the <h1> tag opens the element and the </h1> tag closes the element. With a few exceptions (explained later on), you need both the open tag and the close tag to correctly and completely code the element. If you don't close the element, that formatting will continue on forever, and you don't want the entire page to be one big header, now do you?
Proceed to Heads and Bodies.