Hypertext Markup Language, or as it is more commonly known, HTML, is the computer language at the heart of the World Wide Web. When you create a Web site, you can use cool HTML codes to put the text, pictures, animations, and perhaps video and sound onto the individual Web pages that make up the site. In addition, HTML lets you insert hypertext links and interactive buttons that connect your Web pages to other pages on your Web site and on other Web sites around the world. Web design is a creative process, and HTML is simply one of the tools (the page description language) you use to produce Web pages.
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HTML is a text markup and not a programming language. In theory, a Web page you create using HTML should be viewable by anyone with a computer, any Web browser, and access to the Internet. In reality, the ability to view all the content on a Web page depends on the capabilities of your Web browser. Web browsers are programs that interpret the HTML in Web page documents and display text, pictures, and animations on the visitor’s computer screen. Either alone or with the help of other installed programs, browsers also play back any video and sound files you use HTML to insert on a Web page. The latest versions of the two most popular Web browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, can display just about anything you can use HTML to put onto a Web page. For visitors to access Web pages on your Web site, they must first connect to the Internet and start a Web browser. After the Web server sends a Web page to the visitor’s computer, the Web browser interprets the HTML in the Web page file and displays the file’s contents as text and graphics images in the browser’s application window.
When you design a Web page, keep in mind that not all your site visitors will be using the latest version of Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Stick with the basic HTML for the majority of the content you place on your Web pages. Then, use some of HTML’s more advanced features to add pizzazz and keep site visitors coming back for another look. By combining basic and advanced cool HTML codes capabilities on the same page, you make it possible for everyone to access the important information you want to publish and for those with the latest browsers to have a truly memorable experience.
A Web page consists of a series of HTML instructions that you can enter into a file using any text editor. As mentioned previously, Web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer follow the instructions in the text document you create to display the Web page content onscreen. (Web page content is the text, graphics, and other things [such as video and sound] that you use HTML to place on a Web page.)
If you think creating a Web page document is easy, you are right. In fact, Web site creation began with the simplest of intentions. The original HTML standard described an uncomplicated, easy-to-learn language that let you create text-only documents, which were viewable by anyone who had access to the Internet. Although the HTML standards committee, the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C), has added many new instructions (called tags and attributes) to the HTML language, you can still create even the most feature-rich Web page by typing simple HTML commands into a document you create with a text editor (such as Windows Notepad). You can visit the W3C’s Web site at http://www.w3.org/ for a complete description of various Internet technologies including HTTP, HTML, Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and so on.
Essentially, a Web page is a text file that contains instructions in the form of HTML codes (called tags) and attributes. The tags are the commands the Web browser later follows to format the text and insert the graphics images you want on the Web page. Some, but not all, HTML commands require both a start and an end tag. Those that do are called container tags, because the instruction in the start tag applies to everything the Web page contains between the start tag and the end tag. Each HTML command (that is, each HTML tag) starts with a less-than sign (<) followed by the tag’s name and any attributes, and ends with a greater-than sign (>). To create an end tag for a start tag, you insert a forward slash (/) in front of the tag’s name. Thus, a start tag has the form and an end tag has the form . The tag’s name tells the Web browser the tag’s purpose; the attributes (if any) that follow the tagname give the Web browser additional information the browser needs to carry out the tag’s instructions. For example, the following code illustrates how the start and end paragraph tags ( ) enclose, or contain, a section of text. In this example, the tag instructs the Web browser to display the text up to the tag using the default formatting rules:
This is an example of paragraph text.
If you want the browser to display the paragraph text using a specific font and color, you would add attributes that specified such things as the color, typeface, size, and so on to a tag that follows the tag and precedes the text whose look you want to specify.
To organize the various parts of the cool HTMLcodes that describes a Web page, you use a set of section tags. The types of HTML tags in each section of the Web page definition have a specific purpose:
- <html> html> These occur at the start and end of an HTML document. As such, start and end HTML tags enclose all the other HTML tags you use to describe the Web page.
- <head> head> Start and end header tags immediately follow the start HTML tags () and denote the Web page header. You can use tags in the Web page header to include such information as the name of the author and the date the author created the page. In addition, you insert tags with information that describes your page so that Web search engines can add references to your page to their search indexes. Of the HTML tags and information you place in the header section, the visitor’s browser displays only the Web page title. You insert the Web page title in the header section between start and end title tags (), as shown in the code sample that follows this list of section tags.
- <body> body> Start and end body tags immediately follow the Web page header section and denote the Web page body. The body section of the Web page contains the tags that tell the Web browser what to display onscreen and how you want it to look.
The following code illustrates the correct placement of the HTML section tags:
Note that you can write HTML tags as all uppercase, all lowercase, or a combination of the two, because Web browsers are currently case-insensitive. However, standards such as the XHTML and XML specification require that you use lowercase tags-even if Web browsers continue to support both lower and uppercase tags for a time. As such, write all your HTML tags and attributes in lowercase. That way, as Web browsers force Web designers to comply with newer standards, the Web browsers will still render correctly the Web pages you create now.
