What is HTML source, anyway?

Updated 2026-10-22T00:00:00.000Z

Quick answer
HTML source is the text a website sends to your browser. The browser turns it into the page you see. Viewing it shows how the page is built.

Try it now

Every web page is a text file written in HTML. When you open a page, your browser downloads that text and turns it into headings, images and buttons. The text itself is the source.

The parts you’ll see

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Shown in the browser tab</title>
    <meta name="description" content="Shown in search results">
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>The main heading</h1>
    <p>A paragraph of text.</p>
  </body>
</html>

• Tags like <p> and </p> mark where something starts and ends.
• Attributes like lang="en" give a tag extra information.
• The head holds information about the page: the title, the description, links to styles and scripts.
• The body holds what you see.
• Comments like <!-- note --> are notes for developers. Browsers ignore them.

Why look at it?

• To check what search engines see: the title, description and canonical link.
• To learn how a site is built, or which tools it uses.
• To find an image or file address.
• To fix your own site.

Try it on any page: paste an address on viewhtmlonline.com.