HTML Basic
HTML Introduction
HTML Elements
HTML Basic Tags
HTML Colors
HTML Colorvalues
HTML Formatting
HTML Entities
HTML Links
HTML Frames
HTML Tables
HTML Lists
HTML Forms
HTML Images
HTML Background
HTML Fonts

Introduction to HTML

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What is the World Wide Web?

  • The World Wide Web (WWW) is most often called the Web.
  • The Web is a network of computers all over the world.
  • All the computers in the Web can communicate with each other.
  • All the computers use a communication standard called HTTP.

How does the  WWW work?

  • Web information is stored in documents called Web pages. 
  • Web pages are files stored on computers called Web servers.
  • Computers reading the Web pages are called Web clients.
  • Web clients view the pages with a program called a Web browser.
  • Popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

How does the browser fetch the pages?

  • A browser fetches a Web page from a server by a request.
  • A request is a standard HTTP request containing a page address.
  • A page address looks like this: http://www.someone.com/page.htm.

How does the browser display the pages?

  • All Web pages contain instructions for display
  • The browser displays the page by reading these instructions.
  • The most common display instructions are called HTML tags.
  • HTML tags look like this <p>This is a Paragraph</p>.

Who is making the Web standards?

  • The Web standards are not made up by Netscape or Microsoft.
  • The rule-making body of the Web is the W3C.
  • W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium.
  • W3C puts together specifications for Web standards.
  • The most essential Web standards are HTML, CSS and XML.
  • The latest HTML standard is XHTML 1.0.

What is an HTML File?

  • HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
  • An HTML file is a text file containing small markup tags
  • The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page
  • An HTML file must have an htm or html file extension
  • An HTML file can be created using a simple text editor

Do You Want to Try It?

If you are running Windows, start Notepad (or start SimpleText if you are on a Mac) and type in the following text:

<html>
<head>
<title>Title of page</title>
</head>
<body>
This is my first homepage. <b>This text is bold</b>
</body>
</html>

Save the file as "mypage.htm". 

Start your Internet browser. Select "Open" (or "Open Page") in the File menu of your browser. A dialog box will appear. Select "Browse" (or "Choose File") and locate the HTML file you just created - "mypage.htm" - select it and click "Open". Now you should see an address in the dialog box, for example "C:\MyDocuments\mypage.htm". Click OK, and the browser will display the page.

Example Explained

The first tag in your HTML document is <html>. This tag tells your browser that this is the start of an HTML document. The last tag in your document is </html>. This tag tells your browser that this is the end of the HTML document.

The text between the <head> tag and the </head> tag is header information. Header information is not displayed in the browser window.

The text between the <title> tags is the title of your document. The title is displayed in your browser's caption.

The text between the <body> tags is the text that will be displayed in your browser.

The text between the <b> and </b> tags will be displayed in a bold font.

HTM or HTML Extension?

When you save an HTML file, you can use either the .htm or the .html extension. We have used .htm in our examples. It might be a bad habit inherited from the past when some of the commonly used software only allowed three letter extensions.

With newer software we think it will be perfectly safe to use .html.

Note on HTML Editors:

You can easily edit HTML files using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor like FrontPage, Claris Home Page, or Adobe PageMill instead of writing your markup tags in a plain text file.

But if you want to be a skillful Web developer, we strongly recommend that you use a plain text editor to learn your primer HTML.

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