What is HTML?

First of all, let me tell you what HTML is not.  HTML stands for hypertext mark-up language, however it is not a programming language at all.  It is simply a way of "marking up" text so that web browsers can display it properly on a viewer's screen.  HTML is a public standard, but it is important to remember that the two major browsers, Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, have each added extensions, or additional commands, that can be viewed only by users of that particular browser.

For most of us, text mark-up is handled transparently for us by our text editor.  If we want our text to be bold, italicized, or centered on the page, we simply click and it is done.  The lower level formatting that we once had to do manually is now hidden from us by the program.  However, not so many years ago, users needed to insert their own codes.  You may remember enclosing your text between codes such as ctrl+B to add emphasis.  HTML is very similar to this.

Although the Web is growing rapidly, HTML is still the basis for standard web page development, and is very easy to learn.  An example illustrating the use of tags is shown in the following "marked-up" text:   

        My what a <B>beautiful</B> day!

This would display on your browser as:

        My what a beautiful day!

In this example, <B> and </B> are HTML tags that tell the browser that I want the word "beautiful" to have extra emphasis.  A tag is made up of a left angle bracket (<), the tag name, and a right angle bracket (>).  HTML has three kinds of tags.  Container tags, like the <B> and </B> above, have both an opening and a closing tag.  They're called container tags because they contain the text that we want to act on between them.  You'll notice that the closing tag has a slash (/) in front of the tag name to indicate that it's a closing tag.

The second kind of tag is an empty tag. It is used by itself to indicate some type of action.  For example, the tag <BR> is used to tell the browser to insert a line break, similar to the return or Enter key on the keyboard.  Text that follows the <BR> tag will be placed on the next line.  It stands by itself - no closing tag is needed.  The <BR> tag would be useful for formatting the lines of an address.  HTML is not case sensitive, so you can use <BR> or <br>.

Document tags define the parts of the HTML document, such as head and body.  More on them on the next page.

Now that you have a very basic idea of what HTML is, let's move on and actually create a very simple HTML document.