Getting Set Up

HTML needs no installation. You need two things you probably already have:

1. A web browser — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge. Having two different browsers is useful for testing.
2. A text editor — any editor that saves plain text. Word processors like Microsoft Word are not suitable, because they save formatting information, not plain text.

Recommended editor

Visual Studio Code (free, Windows/macOS/Linux) understands HTML out of the box: syntax colors, auto-closing tags, and Emmet abbreviations (type ! and press Tab in an empty .html file to get a complete page skeleton).

Other good choices: Sublime Text, WebStorm, Zed, or Notepad++ on Windows.

A project folder

Create a folder for your work, for example my-site, and save your files there with the .html extension:

my-site/
  index.html
  about.html
  images/
    logo.png

index.html is special: web servers show it when someone visits a folder's address without naming a file.

Try it without installing anything

Online playgrounds such as CodePen, JSFiddle, and the MDN Playground let you type HTML and see the result immediately. They're handy for experiments, but keep real projects in files on your computer. You can also paste markup into our HTML Viewer to preview it.