What Is HTML?
A free lesson from Swipe Coding · HTML, level 1 · updated October 2026
By the Swipe team, founded by Colin · how we make lessons
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is not a programming language in the traditional sense — it does not calculate, loop, or make decisions. Instead, it describes the structure and content of a web page: which piece of text is a heading, which is a paragraph, which is a link.
<h1>Welcome</h1> <p>This is a paragraph of text.</p>
"Markup" means exactly that: you take plain text and mark it up with tags that say what each piece is. A browser reads those tags and displays the content accordingly — a heading looks big and bold, a paragraph wraps normally, a link is clickable.
Every website you've ever visited — no matter what it's built with underneath — sends HTML to your browser in the end. Frameworks and backend languages generate it, content management systems assemble it, but HTML is always the actual thing the browser receives and renders.
What does HTML actually do?
HTML stands for HyperText ____ Language.
HTML is a programming language that can perform calculations and loops.
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