What is html?
What is HTML and how does it work?
In simple terms and to just introduce HTML (and not technical), most pages that people view on the internet are simply text files, that are being displayed a special way within a browser, they simply have the affix .html instead of .txt.
Whatever your browser (Internet explorer, firefox, opera, safari etc) they will attempt to render the text document according to some rules contained within it.
The rules contained within the document are in the form of tags placed within a < and a >.
These tags specify the rules or “markup” language for the way the text should be displayed.
The tags (generally) must have an equal amount of opening and closing tags, and must be closed in order.
There are many different tags, with many different uses.
For example, to render text as a header, the tag would be <h1>HEADER TEXT</h1>.
The tagging or, “markup language” explains the latter part of the acroynm HTML or “Hyper”, “Text”, “Markup“, “Language“.
The foremost “Hyper” and “Text” relates to pages hyper linking to one another by clicking on special text.
Hyper text is created by embedding text, with an associated URL by use of a special tag (known as an anchor point).
The anchor point displays the text to the viewer but however when it is clicked it will redirect the browser to a new defined location, “Hyper”, “Text” through “Markup”, “Language”.
An anchor point would look something like <a href=”URL”>TEXT THAT IS CLICKABLE</a>
However, browsers do expect some basic rules to be followed relating to the way in which the HTML appears.
There are many more advanced rules, which are beyond the scope of this basic introduction, but the most important are the document consist of a Head and Body wrapped in a html root tag.
The head tells the browser information such as the title of the page, and the body would be the content, but however the page would display without this formatting.
For example:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | <html>
<head>
<title>Hello World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
</body>
</html> |
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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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