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Practical HTML Primer

So, you want to learn about formatting documents for the World Wide Web. You may have a number of questions, not the least of which could be, "What is HTML?" This primer will help you understand some of the basics of HTML, at least the bare necessities of what it takes to make a document ready for Web publishing. It probably sounds a lot more technical than it really is. One of the other aims of this beginner's tutorial is to make the concepts a little less technical and more comfortable for you.

The point is not to turn you into an HTML expert, but to enable you to understand the basic structure of a Web page—how the code tells your Web browser how to display the page. You will no doubt have the benefit of using an HTML editor such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, or some other handy tool to generate your future Web pages (much like a word processor), which will take a great deal of the hardship out of the process. However, it helps to understand what exactly that application is doing, and that means HTML markup.

Let's start with a couple of basic definitions:

HTML

HyperText Markup Language—this is the language of the World Wide Web, a system of markup tags that tells your browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, etc.) how to structurally display a page.

Tags

These are the internal structural markers that define HTML documents. Any piece of content on an HTML page is usually defined by enclosing it within a pair of tags that looks something like this:

<TAG>content</TAG>

HTML documents are saved as text files; however, rather than saving to a .txt file, HTML files are saved with the extension of .html or .htm (e.g., index.html, the filename for the page you're currently viewing). They are not saved as Word documents, Excel files, or any other format—just plain text with the .html extension. If an HTML file is saved as anything other than text, it will not show up properly (if at all).

There—you now have the basic principles of HTML boiled down into less than a page. How hard could this be? To find out, go to the next lesson: Required Tags.

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