HTML Introduction
An HTML file is just a page of text, like an email
message or a word processor document. In fact, you
can use a word processor to write HTML code. Or you
can use pretty much anything that allows you to type
something in and save it as a text document. Web browsers
want only text, that's it. They can't deal with anything
else.
An HTML file contains all the writing that will appear
on your page, plus instructions to the browser about
where that writing should go and how it should look.
And if you have any pictures or animations or sounds
or whatever that you want to include, the HTML file
will tell the browser where to find them and where
to put them on your page.
HTML does this by using things called tags.
Tags are letters or words between two brackets, like
this: <tag>. There
are a whole bunch of these tags, and learning HTML
pretty much means learning all the various tags.
Each tag does a different thing. For example, there's
one that will make your text bigger, another that
will center it on the page, and another that will
create a link somewhere else. So what you do is pick
the tag that you want to use, then put it right in
front of the word that you want to change. This tells
the browser that it's supposed to do something there.
Let's say you want the word "country" to
be boldfaced. Bold text is used to emphasize words,
and "country" is the most important word
on your page. Well, you need to tell the Web browser
that you want "country" in bold, so you
use the bold tag, which looks like this:
<b>
"B" stands for "bold." Most tags
use abbreviations like this, making them pretty easy
to remember. So the tag is telling the browser, "Look,
buddy, I want everything after me to be in boldface."
The Web browser does what it's told and makes the
word bold.
The problem is that the browser doesn't know when
to stop - it'll put every single word after that tag
into boldface. To keep this from happening, you need
to tell the browser when enough is enough. That's
why HTML has closing tags. Closing tags are just like
the regular tags (sometimes called "opening tags"),
except there's a slash in there before the letter.
The closing tag for boldfacing, then, looks like this:
</b>
So if you just want the word "country"
put into boldface, you stick the regular tag in front
of "country" and the closing tag after it:
<b>country</b>
You can put these tags wherever you want on your
page. The Web browser knows not to display these tags
on your page, but just to read them and obey their
instructions.
Every HTML file has to start and end with the same
tags. So the first tag you have to use is the <html>
tag. It has to be the first thing on the page, and
its closing tag, </html>, has to be the last
thing.
Inside the <html> tags go the <body> tags.
This tells the browser where to look for all the actual
content on your page. <html> and <body>
are really the only tags you have to use. There are
others that you should use, but for now we can get
away with just those two. So if you type something
inside the <body> tags, well you'll have a Web
page.
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