HTML starts to feel real the moment you put actual words on the page. In the last article, everything was structure: declarations, roots, heads, and bodies. Necessary, but not exactly something that visually indicates you've done anything. Text is the first kind of content every webpage has, and HTML gives you a handful of tags that turn raw words into something the browser can understand.
The most familiar one is the paragraph, written with the <p> tag. Whenever you’re expressing a thought or an idea in a block of text, chances are you’re dealing with a paragraph. Different browsers apply different base styling to keep reading comfortable, and because the <p> tag actually describes what the content is, not how it should look, it works well with search engines, screen readers, and custom styling later on.
Then there are headings, from <h1> all the way to <h6>. They don’t exist just to make text bigger or bolder (browsers already do that). They create hierarchy. <h1> marks the main title or topic of your page, <h2> marks major sections under that title, and the levels keep nesting down from there. This structure helps readers scan, and it helps browsers understand how your content is organized. A clean heading structure is one of the simplest signs of thoughtful HTML.
You’ll also bump into a few smaller helpers:
<strong> for giving text importance, <em> for emphasis, and <br> for those rare moments when you genuinely need a line break without starting a new paragraph. These aren’t about decoration, they’re signals about meaning. The browser can interpret them, assistive technologies can read them correctly, and CSS can style them in consistent ways.
Here’s a small example that puts all of this together:
<body>
<h1>The Beauty of Simple HTML</h1>
<p>HTML becomes much easier to work with once you understand how text elements work together. Paragraphs carry ideas, while headings give them structure.</p>
<h2>Why Headings Matter</h2>
<p>They help both readers and browsers understand how your content is organized.</p>
<h2>Adding Emphasis</h2>
<p>Sometimes you want to <em>highlight</em> a word or show that something is <strong>especially important</strong>.</p>
</body>
Nothing fancy, but it already reads like a real page. The tags don’t decorate the content, they explain what the content is. Once you learn to think this way, writing HTML becomes more like describing meaning than arranging shapes.
This set of tags forms the core of everyday HTML writing. They’re the tools you’ll use constantly, whether you’re building a blog, a dashboard, or a landing page. In the next article, we’ll move beyond text and into the visual glue of the web: links, images, and basic media.
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