<html> stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is a language for describing the structure of a document, not its actual presentation. HTML defines a set of common styles for web pages: headings, paragraphs, lists, and tables. It also defines character styles such as boldface and code examples. These styles are indicated inside HTML documents using tags. The first page structure tag in every HTML page is the <html> tag. It indicates that the content of this file is in the HTML language. Each tag web page has a specific name and is set off from the content of the document using opening tags <> and closing tags </>.
<title> The title indicates what your web page is about and is used to refer to the page in the browser's list of favorites or bookmarks. Titles also appear in the title bar of graphical browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer.
<head> The head tag specifies that the lines within the opening and closing tag are the prologue to the rest of the file. Generally, only a few tags go into the <head> portion of the page. You should never put any of the text of your page into the header.
<body> The remainder of your HTML page is enlcosed within a <body> tag. This includes all the text and other content (links, pictures, and so on).
Sample html code in a simple text editor such as TextWrangler or NotePad:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>My Sample HTML Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is an HTML Page.</h1>
<p>Sample HTML info.</p>
</body>
</html>
Sample html code with background/text color and a 50% horizontal rule.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>My Sample HTML Page</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffe0" text="#e9967a">
<h1>This is an HTML Page.</h1>
<hr align="left" size="8" width="50%" noshade="noshade" />
<p>Sample HTML info.</p>
</body>
</html>