HTML - Introduction

HTML is the language of the Net. HTML can accomplish only two things: tell your browser how and where to display text and images. "Where" refers to where it places the object on the page and "How" refers to the formatting. Formatting can be anything from color to size to style (font, bold, italic).

HTML is easier than you might think. HTML is mostly in English, but with a few special characters. Basically, an HTML page is all text, enclosed by tags. A tag is simply an abbreviation inside two angle brackets. < > The most basic example is the paragraph tags: .

As you can see, a "paragraph" actually consists of two tags. Namely,  and . Tags always come in pairs (with only 4 exceptions). The first tag is the opening tag, the second tag is the closing tag.

Here's an example of properly coded paragraphs:

HTML is the language of the Net. HTML can accomplish only two things: tell your browser how and where to display text and images. "Where" refers to where it places the object on the page and "How" refers to the formatting. Formatting can be anything from color to size to style (font, bold, italic).

HTML is easier than you might think. HTML is mostly in English, but with a few special characters. Basically, an HTML page is all text, enclosed by tags. A tag is simply an abbreviation inside two angle brackets.

You might have noticed that I used my own code from above for the example. Well, there's another way you can see my code. And anybody else's for that matter. Just go to any Web page and "View Source". In the Interent Explorer menu bar it's: View and then Source. For Netscape it's: View and then Page Source. In fact, many of my collegues and I used this technique to learn HTML. HTML is not copyrighted, so feel free to look at other people's interesting code and use it yourself. Warning: Code may not be copyrighted, but the text/content may be. Use other people's content only with permission.

Before we move on, below is an example of a fully coded HTML document:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN">

<html> <head> <title>Untitled</title> </head>

<body> This is a paragraph. </body> </html>

This page would display as:

This is a paragraph.

You need everything in that sample document for all of your Web pages, except for the bolded paragraph. All you have to do is to put your content inside the <body></body> tags and fill in a title for your Web page between the <title></title> tags. To get a real feel for HTML, I've included a practice section (located below) at the end of every lesson. With it, you can write HTML and then see what it will actually look like on a real Web page.

Practice

Now you're ready to move on to Basic Formatting.

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