A beginners guide to HTML - by Sarah Kiko

A beginner's guide to HTML

5 of 22

by Sarah Kiko

Created on: January 21, 2009

There are many languages in existence that are used to generate web pages. Each has its own pros, cons, and specific uses. If you are just starting out with web design, however, you are most likely to use Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML.

HTML is not actually a programming language, as many people mistakenly label it, but rather a markup language. Markup languages consist of a set of markup tags that tell a web browser how to display a web page, rather than lines of code that execute in a specified order to produce an end result, as in a software program.

The markup tags in HTML are referred to as HTML elements. They are enclosed in angle brackets, which look like this: <>. Nearly every HTML element has an "opening" tag and a "closing" or "end" tag. In addition, the tags are used in a hierarchical fashion, which is described further below.

HTML tags and plain text combine to form an HTML document, which describes a web page. An HTML document file ends in either the ".html" or ".htm" file extension. The ".htm" extension originates from a time when the software used to create the file only allowed a three-character extension. Now it is more common to see the ".html" extension.

One of the benefits of using HTML to design a web page is that you do not need any special software to create HTML documents. You can use a plain text editor like Notepad, or a word processing program like Microsoft Word(tm), although if active, Word's spelling and grammar checks will mark most of your document as issues. There are also open source and free HTML editors such as PageBreeze and CoffeeCup which provide feedback as you create your document and allow you to see how it will look with a WYSIWYG function (What You See Is What You Get). There are also programs available for purchase that provide the same functionality, such as Adobe Dreamweaver(tm) and Microsoft FrontPage(tm).

There are a couple of HTML elements that every HTML web page document must include: the "html" element and the "body" element. These two elements must contain both the opening and closing tags: <html> with </html> and <body> with </body>. In addition to the pairs, there is a hierarchy to the elements that must be maintained. The html element is always at the highest level of the hierarchy; that is, <html> must be the first tag in the document, and </html> must be the last tag. It defines the entire document as an HTML document. Inside this pair of tags comes the body

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