HTML – or HyperText Markup Language – is a fundamental building block of the web. In the context of web traffic and analytics, HTML is used to structure content on a webpage and can be used to track user engagement with that content.
What Is HTML and What Is It Used For
HTML is a markup language, made up of a series of elements that are denoted by tags. The most basic tag is the `html` tag, which defines the start and end of an HTML document. All other tags must be nested within this tag. In addition, there are a number of tags that can be used to add multimedia content to a page, including images, audio, and video.
So what is used for? HTML is a markup language that allows you to create web pages. It’s the foundation of every website—the internet is built on top of it.
HTML Basics and Code Examples
HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language, which means that it is used to annotate text. In the case of HTML, the annotations are used to indicate how the text should be displayed in a web browser. Here are a few examples using code, to see how HTML works in practice.
Image credit: htmlcheatsheet.com
The annotations are added using HTML tags. Most tags come in pairs, with an opening tag and a closing tag. For example, the `p` tag is used to indicate a paragraph of text. The opening `p` tag looks like this:
`p`
And the closing `p` tag looks like this:
`/p`
The text that you want to be a part of the paragraph goes in between the opening and closing tags, like this:
`p` This is a paragraph of text.`/p`
There are a few tags that do not come in pairs. These are called empty tags, and they are used to add information that doesn’t require a closing tag. For example, the `br` tag is used to indicate where a line break should occur. The `img` tag is used to insert an image into a web page.
There are a variety of other tags that can be used to structure content, including `head`, `body`, and `title` tags. The `head` tag contains information about the document, such as the title, and the `body` tag contains the actual content of the page.
HTML’s Role in Analytics
Parse.ly uses HTML to help you make sense of your website data. When you install the Parse.ly tracking code on your site, we insert a small snippet of HTML into your pages. This allows us to collect data about how users are interacting with your content.
We use this data to provide you with insights about what content is most popular, which pieces are being shared the most, and where users are spending the most time on your site.