What is HTML?

OK, so you've never played with HTML before. You're not even too sure what it is, other than knowing it's what creates web pages. Basically (I hate that word, but it's probably going to come up a lot) 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).

For the technically minded among you, HTML stands for the HyperText Markup Language. You could really amaze your friends with that!

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 stopped - for example, there is a tag for underlining text. You put <U> to start underlining and </U> to stop. For example:

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

You put everything the browser needs to know within these tags. Most tags have extra attributes that let you give 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 should do what, and the boffins at Microsoft and Netscape should program their browsers to adhere to these rules. However, they don't. 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.

Throughout these guides I'll try to stick to 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 IE and Netscape for free, so there's no excuse.

But there's more...

When I say that HTML is the language behind web pages, I suppose I'm not being completely honest. There is more to most webpages, 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 think). Then there's Perl, used to create CGI scripts which are often used to process informaton sent in by your visitors via a form. On top of that you've got SSI, PHP, ASP and so on.

Don't panic yet though - once you've learnt HTML, you can start to add these extra components to your webpages without even having to learn the other languages if you don't want to. HTML is the place to start though - you're not wasting your time!