# Week 2 — HTML & the DOM

## What is HTML?

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language of the web. It's a way to structure content on a page using tags. For example:

```html
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
```

This tells the browser to display a heading and a paragraph. HTML is not a programming language — it doesn't have logic or variables. It's a markup language that describes the structure of content.

## The DOM — Document Object Model

When the browser loads an HTML page, it parses the HTML and creates a tree-like structure called the **DOM** (Document Object Model). The DOM represents the page as a hierarchy of nodes, where each node corresponds to an element in the HTML. For example, the HTML above would create a DOM with a root node containing an `<h1>` node and a `<p>` node.

The DOM allows JavaScript to interact with the page. You can use JavaScript to read and modify the DOM, which is how you create dynamic web pages. For example, you could use JavaScript to change the text of the heading or add new paragraphs.