HTML is a markup language, not a programming language. It lets you add images, text, tables and formatting to web pages. At the time of this web page being published, HTML was in version 4.0. You must know that HTML has evolved into a language defining document appearance , not document structure. Each HTML document consists of tags, which tell the browser how to display the file.
Some tags are more widely used than others, and some only work with certain browsers.
Although Internet Explorer has the best variety of tags, I advise you not to follow the herd and plaster the 'Best viewed in Internet Explorer' banner across your site - Netscape users will miss out. All my pages have this basic layout. Each tag tells the browser to do something. Opening and closing tags are a bit starters and stoppers. Here are the most basic HTML tags and their functions.