What is HTML?
June 21 2011
When you visit a web page, you are reading the result of HTML. HTML is the computer language used to tell web pages how to display and what to put where. What? You didn’t think web paged just happened did you? NO. They are put together that way and someone has designed that page to look the way it does.
The letters “HTML” stand for “Hyper Text Markup Language”. This language is the most widely used language today. There are literally thousands of tags available to help web designers of all experience levels write effective pages. This is not to be confused with a computer programming language. In fact, HTML has nothing to do with programming.
HTML is a set of markup tags that are utilized on web pages. Almost anyone can write HTML with very little instruction. You can literally learn to create and use markup tags all on your own. I did and now I am teaching YOU how to do it only 3 years later. THAT’S how easy it really is.
Let’s get into some of the basic elements of HTML and get you started. Now don’t be intimidated. Nobody will see what you do until much later, so this is where you practice and get it down.
Tags in HTML are commands, called keywords, that are enclosed in “less than” or “greater than” symbols, like this <tag>. That is an opening tag. Each complete tag needs an opening tag and a closing tag. Opening tags start the process of whatever it is you want to do. Closing tags end that process and look like this; </tag>.
Simple so far, right? Yeah, it is. Just remember that the tags ALWAYS come in pairs. A starting point and an ending point. Point A and point B, if you will.
The next term you need to be familiar with is “HTML documents”. These are documents that describe or tell the page how to display, from text colors to page placement and other text or graphic appearances. HTML docs contain HTML tags and simple text. The tags tell the text how it should look to the reader. The more common name for these is “web pages”.
There. You already know more than you did when you got here, so you’re doing great! So what is it that reads the HTML and makes it all work? That is where web browsers come onto the scene. All web browsers do is read the tags on the page you called up, then arrange the text according to the tags in the document.
Let’s start a web page now. I will label the tags in bold print for you.
<html> Opening tag. Starts the web page
<body> Opening tag. Starts the main text area of the page.
Everything between these tags appears on the page. Manipulate and place this text with font, graphic or other HTML tags. We’ll see some of those later.
</body> Closing tag. Ends the main text area of the page.
</html> Closing tag. Ends the web page.
This will get you started, so we’ll look at some useful HTML tags in the next installment.
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