Beginner HTML Interview Questions and Answers

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the standard markup language for web pages. It describes the structure and meaning of content (headings, paragraphs, links, images, forms) using elements written as tags. It is not a programming language: it has no logic, variables or loops. CSS handles presentation and JavaScript handles behaviour.

A tag is the markup itself: the opening tag <p> or the closing tag </p>. An element is the whole thing: the opening tag, its content and the closing tag, for example <p>Hello</p>. Void elements such as <img> consist of a single tag.

<!DOCTYPE html> at the top of a document tells the browser to render the page in standards mode. Without it, browsers use quirks mode, which imitates old browser bugs and can change how layout and sizing work. It is not an HTML element.

The <head> contains information about the page that is not displayed in it: <title>, <meta> tags (charset, viewport, description), <link> (stylesheets, icons), <style> and <script>. The <body> contains everything visible: headings, text, images, links, forms.

Elements that cannot have content and therefore have no closing tag, such as <br>, <hr>, <img>, <input>, <meta> and <link>. Writing <br /> is allowed in HTML, but the slash has no effect.

Attributes add information to an element and are written in the opening tag as name="value": href on a link, src and alt on an image, type on an input, id and class on any element. Boolean attributes such as disabled, checked and required are on when present, whatever their value.

Block elements (<div>, <p>, <h1>, <ul>, <section>) start on a new line and take the full available width. Inline elements (<span>, <a>, <strong>, <em>) flow within a line of text and are only as wide as their content. CSS display can change this.

Both are generic containers with no meaning, used for styling or scripting. <div> is a block container for grouping larger sections; <span> is an inline container for a word or phrase inside text. Prefer a semantic element when one fits.

An id must be unique on the page and identifies one element; a class can be shared by many elements, and an element can have several classes. In CSS they are selected with #id and .class. Ids are also used for fragment links (href="#id") and for connecting <label for> to fields.

Using elements according to their meaning: <header>, <nav>, <main>, <article>, <button>, <h1>, rather than generic <div>s styled to look right. It improves accessibility (screen readers navigate by headings and landmarks), SEO (search engines understand the structure), gives built-in keyboard behaviour, and makes code easier to maintain.

alt provides a text alternative for an image. Screen readers read it to blind users, browsers show it when the image fails to load, and search engines use it to understand the image. Meaningful images need a short description; purely decorative images should have an empty alt="" so screen readers skip them.

<strong> marks importance and <em> marks stress emphasis; both carry meaning. <b> and <i> style text as bold or italic without extra importance, for keywords, terms or foreign phrases. If you only want a visual style, use CSS.

<ol> is a numbered list where order matters (steps). <ul> is a bulleted list where order does not matter. <dl> is a list of name-value pairs, with <dt> for terms and <dd> for descriptions (glossaries, metadata). Items in <ol> and <ul> are <li> elements.

Add target="_blank": <a href="https://example.com" target="_blank">Example</a>. Modern browsers apply rel="noopener" behaviour by default, so the new page cannot control the original one. Use it sparingly and tell users the link opens a new tab.

"HTML5" was the name for the major update that added semantic elements (<header>, <nav>, <article>, <section>, <footer>), native <audio> and <video>, <canvas>, new input types (email, date, range), built-in form validation, and APIs such as local storage. Today HTML is maintained as a single Living Standard by WHATWG, which is continuously updated rather than released in numbered versions.

Character references that display characters with special meaning or that are hard to type: < for <, > for >, & for &, " for ",   for a non-breaking space, © for ©. Any Unicode character can be written numerically, such as ₹ for ₹.