Articles - HTML

HTML - What is HTML?

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. This is the primary language used in web pages to deal with formatting issues for text and images. It provides a way to determine when a new paragraph or new line starts, as well as when there are links and what those links point to.

When a web page is written it consists of more than just the text you see in your browser. There are other elements on this web page. Elements called tags tell your browser what to do with the things you see (text and pictures). The tags are the HTML as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The tags are different than text as they are enclosed in brackets “<” and “>”. So, when the browser sees brackets it knows to look for specific key words as defined by the W3C. For example “<i>” tells the browser to make the text italics. To turn the italics off another tag is used, “</i>”. Other tags specific to text are “<strong>” to make something bold, “<u>” to put an underline beneath the text. To make a new paragraph you use the tag “<p>”.

HTML is used to place images too. These tags have more than just one word, but other elements to help explain what to do with the element. For example, “<img>” means to place an image at that spot on the page. However, the browser doesn’t know what image unless you give the tag more information. So, “<img src=imagelocation>” is the image tag with source information. If you want to adjust the size of the image you can use <img src=imagesource width=100 height=100> and the picture will show up 100 pixels by 100 pixels. This is just a basic idea how these tags work.

Another HTML tag is for creating links. The link tag is “<a href=link>”. The “<a>” or anchor is a tag that tells the browser you want to mark the following section and the “href=” is like “src” for image. When you click on the text following this tag, the browser will follow the link to the new web site. An example of this on a webpage would be <a href=newpage.htm>Go to a new page</a>. Note the closing “</a>” following the word “page”. This tells the browser that is the end of the link. There are numerous resources on the internet providing more detailed information on the various HMTL tags available.