What is HTML?

OK, so you've probably 'viewed source' on a few pages but never played with HTML before. You're not even too sure what it is, other than knowing it's what creates web pages. Essentially HTML is a set of instructions, read by a piece of software called a browser, to display a page of information.

HTML is not actually a programming language as it doesn't run a program. Think of an HTML file just like a word processor file that a program (like Microsoft Word) looks at to get instructions on what to do (how to display your document).
So you can think of html files as word documents if you like. They can be read by any version of Microsoft Word. In the same way as html documents can be read by any browser.

For the technically minded among you, HTML stands for the HyperText Markup Language.

Tags

So what are tags, I hear you cry! Tags are the commands that tell the browser what to do. Any tag goes inside a pair of greater than and less than symbols, like this:

<TAG>

Some (in fact most) tags also need to be closed or have an ending - for example, there is a tag for making text bold. You put <B> to start bold and </B> to stop. For example:

<B>This text will appear underlined</B>

You put everything the browser needs to know within these tags. Most tags have extra attributes that let you specify more information. For example, the A (anchor) tag has an HREF attribute which lets you specify the path to the file you want to link to. All will become clear once you start using it.

Any text not surrounded by < and > symbols is the text that will actually be displayed on the page, like what you're reading now.

The Rules

The specification for HTML is decided upon by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They decide what tags do what, Browser manufacturers should then program their browsers to adhere to these rules. However,as with everything in life it's a little more complicated than that. There are some things that Netscape can't do, some things that Internet Explorer can't do and they've even been known to invent tags all of their own. That's just the main two browser manufacturers, so you can imagine how many ways of interpreting tags there are with the number of browsers there are.

Throughout these lessons we will use code that works in all browsers, but always check your documents in the various programs to make sure that they display as you expect. You can get copies of most browsers including IE and Netscape for free, so there's no excuse for not checking your work.

AOL of course uses it's own browser and is a slightly different case. In some versions of AOL it is a hybrid IE browser in others it uses a Netscape browser. So if possible you should check in AOL as a large proportion of the web uses AOL.

But there's more.

When we say that HTML is the language behind web pages, we are not being completely honest. There is more to most web pages than HTML, because you can use other languages either on their own or within your HTML.

The most common examples are Java and JavaScript (not as similar as you might be lead to believe by the name). Then there's Perl, used to create CGI scripts which are often used to process information sent in by your visitors via a form. On top of that you've got SSI, PHP, ASP and so on.

Don't worry yet though - once you've learnt HTML, you can start to add these extra components to your web pages without even having to learn the other languages if you don't want to. HTML is the best place to start though as it's the major building block of the web.

Move onto the next section - HTML Files