HTML Internet Basics & Beyond

What The Heck Is HTML? HTML is the language of web pages. In order to truly understand HTML, you need to know a little about browsers, and in order to understand browsers, you really need to know a little about how the web works.

Let's Start At The Beginning... The World Wide Web is a huge collection of computers which are linked together in a network. Data, or information, is stored on every computer on the internet, and takes many forms. Spreadsheets are a form of data, as are Word documents, images, sound bites, and web pages.

Web pages are encoded… Web pages are encoded. The encoding process isn't difficult, and is usually done by hand. The way pages are encoded is with a MARK- UP language we call HTML. Remember that web pages are usually used as a means of conveying data, or information. The data is your message. This is the meat of the HTML document. Text and content are most important.

What happens next? Once you have created a web page, you store it on a certain type of computer called a web server. Web servers are computers which are attached to the Internet, and do basically two things. A web server stores information documents and sends those documents to any other computer which requests them.

What's Really Going on? You attach to the Internet with a special type of computer program known as a browser. The first thing the browser wants to know is where to go. You type in an URL or uniform resource locator. –An URL is an address. This address tells the browser exactly where to find the page you're looking for.

Cue The Browser The browser takes all that raw data, and translates it. Then displays it on your screen. what the browser sees is raw data, which might look like this: But what you see is the browsers interpretation of that data.

Hypertext Markup Language A webpage is simply a text file ending with the suffix.html or.htm. It is created using MS NOTEPAD. This text file is often referred to as the "source code" of a webpage.

<> It's All In The Angles HTML tags are easy to recognize because they are always between a lesser than sign and greater than sign, or as I like to call them, Angle Brackets.

Parts Is Parts Every web page written in HTML has essentially two parts: The Head The Body Now, having told you that, let me tell you about one more tag before going on. The HTML tag tells your computer that everything between these two tags is an HTML document. You'll always begin your page with the opening HTML tag and end it with the closing HTML tag.

The Skeleton Here is the HTML for a VERY simple webpage. THE COOLEST PAGE ON THE WEB Whoa!!! This is so TOTALLY cool. See how these tags fit into each other? And how all the text is between the BODY tags?