What is HTML?
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Thats the name that web
documents are given. And equivalent would be the ".txt" that you see
after text files. That's why a majority of web documents are ".html" or
".htm". It's just the type of file that are used for the web. The
document is transfered from a web server to your internet service
provider, and to your computer. Your computer has a "broswer" which
"decodes" the document. An example of a browser would be Microsoft
Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. These applications will decode
the html coding and translate it to the document that you see. The
browser also transfers images and other files from your server.
You start a HTML document by opening a text editor and saving the document
as a ".html" or ".htm" file. HTML code consists of "tags". Tags look
like this: <html>. Basically its a "<" followed by a ">", with
certain words in between. A start tag looks like this: "<html>" and an
end tag looks like this: "</html>". The only difference between a start
tag and an end tag is the slash. Whatever occurs between the two tags will
take the properties of the tag. So whatever occurs between <b> and
</b> will be bolded, because the <b> tag is the tag used to bold
text. Like this. That code, written in HTML, would be: "Like
<b>this</b>." Notice the word "Like" appears normal, because it is
not withing the <b> tag. The word "this" is bolded because it is
surrounded by a <b> and </b>. A general rule of thumb, always start
your HTML document with <html> and always end it with </html>
You're also supposed to start the document with <!DOCTYPE HTML
idString> But it isn't always necessary. There really isn't
anyone to "enforce" these rules. They aren't necessary, and many
browsers will work fine with out them, but it's proper syntax.
Within the <html> and </html> tags, there are two sections, the
<head> (header) section and the <body> (body) section. They will be
discussed in future lectures.
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