HTML? What's that?
HTML is the language webpages are written in. It's an acronym for hypertext markup language.
Please don't ask what that means, because I'm not too sure myself. The important thing is
that you can write a webpage with it. It's a very simple coding language, but a bunch of web
snobs are trying to pretend it's tough.
The basics.
Here is the most basic, no-frills layout of a webpage.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> Title Here </TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
This is where the text, images, or whatever go.
</BODY>
</HTML>
What it means:
- <HTML> </HTML>
These bits of code (from now on, we'll call them tags) specify the language the document
is written in. Please note the format used. All HTML tags are enclosed in these signs: <
>. The slash(/) is used to indicate that the command should no longer be active. There are
very few commands that don't need to be shut off this way. We'll get to them later. There is
no rule requiring that you use <HTML> </HTML> commands at the beginning of each
document, but I've heard that there soon will be, so use them anyway.
- <HEAD> </HEAD>
These are important commands. They contain many important peices of your document, such as the
title, keywords, and style commands, which we will also get to later. The HEAD commands are
always placed at the top of a document, and should be seperate from the BODY commands at all
times.
- <TITLE> </TITLE>
The TITLE commands contain the words that appear on the top bar of your browser. Search engines
will list these as the name of your pages, and bookmarks and favorite places and the like will
record the title as well, so it's best to have one for each of your pages.
- <BODY> </BODY>
The BODY tags enclose all of the content of your page. You can also use them to specify colors
for text, links, even the background. We'll get into this later. What you have to know NOW is
that BODY tags are where you put almost everything you want your readers to see.
And the code above will look like this.
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