What is ‘HTML’? (Web Coding for Non-Experts)
You probably hear people mention HTML here and there when describing documents designed to be viewed on the Web – and that’sbecause HTML is the ‘language’ used to tell a web browser what to display on a page, and how that content should be formatted.If you look at an existing web page and use the ‘View Source’ command (in Internet Explorer, pull down the View menu to selectSource), you will see what HTML looks like. However, don’t let what you find throw you into a panic; you don’t have to learn thewhole language just to say hello!Take a moment to learn the basics from this document, and HTML won’t seem like such a mystery anymore.
Though many webauthors use WYSISYG (‘What You See Is What You Get’) programs like Microsoft FrontPage that generate HTML code automatically,there may be occasions that you need to edit short documents that don’t justify the expense and learning curve associated withadding a new program to your PC.
Also, many business applications now have the ability to export documents to HTML format; soperhaps you are only looking for an explanation, instead of a new skill. This quick tutorial should help in that sense, as well.
HTML is comprised of a library of components, called 'tags'.
Tags are the building blocks we use to instruct a web browser to do certain things, like make a word show in boldface,center a line of text, or display a graphic. Here are a few common tags to get you started:
<B>
Turn BOLD on
</B>
Turn BOLD off
<I>
Turn ITALICS on
</I>
Turn ITALICS off
<U>
Turn UNDERLINE on
</U>
Turn UNDERLINE off
<CENTER>
Turn CENTER JUSTIFICATION on
</CENTER>
Turn CENTER JUSTIFICATION off You can see that for each tag that turns a formatting feature
on
, there is an accompanying tag that turns the samefeature
off
. Here are some examples of how these are used:HTML CODE:I’d like to take a moment to discuss our <B>plan</B>.HOW IT WOULD BE DISPLAYED IN A WEB BROWSER:I’d like to take a moment to discuss our
plan
.HTML CODE:I’d like to take a moment to discuss <I>our</I> plan.HOW IT WOULD BE DISPLAYED IN A WEB BROWSER:I’d like to take a moment to discuss
our
plan.HTML CODE:<CENTER>I’d like to take a moment to discuss our plan.</CENTER>HOW IT WOULD BE DISPLAYED IN A WEB BROWSER:I’d like to take a moment to discuss our plan.
Some tags have the ability to define their own behavior based on 'attributes'.
Attributes are descriptive switches inside tags that give them more flexibility. Let’s use the <FONT> tag as anexample:HTML CODE:I’d like to take a moment to discuss <FONT FACE="IMPACT" COLOR="RED" SIZE="4">ourplan</FONT>.HOW IT WOULD BE DISPLAYED IN A WEB BROWSER:I’d like to take a moment to discuss
our plan
.As shown in this example, the <FONT> tag can have attributes included for the appearance of a typeface on your webpage. Here, we've specified to display a couple of words in red using the 'Impact' font, and made it larger bychoosing a size of "4".
[Side note about font sizes on web pages: since anybody can alter the default font size theirweb browser displays, we don't specify actual point-sizes for fonts on the web – instead, we make them larger orsmaller than the default font size on the page. "3" is the standard, "1" is the smallest, and "7" is the largest.]
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