by Cskoyles

Created on: March 27, 2009

A Beginners Guide to HTML

Don't let the geeks fool you; HTML, or HyperText Markup Language to use its full name, isn't as difficult as you might think.

At its crux, HTML is the most basic yet prevalent way of building and designing web pages. It's a language which speaks to your web browser and tells it how and where to display text, images, links and more.

So how's it done?

In its simplest form, HTML comprises a series of what are known as elements', made up of two tags' with attributes inside them.

Elements are quite like instructions; they tell your browser what to do by saying things like make this text bold' or display this information in table' and they look a bit like this:

<b>A browser would display this text in bold.</b>

See those two letter "b"s? They're your attributes. The "b", at the risk of insulting your intelligence, stands for bold'. And the "<" and ">" at either side of them? They're your tags.

The first one, <b>, tells the browser to start putting things in bold. That's what those in the know call a start tag'. If you look at the second one, that has a backslash before the letter which basically tells it to stop and, not surprisingly, it's known as the end tag'.

Both are equally as important. Without your start tag, a browser won't have a clue what to do with whatever comes after it, whilst if you forget to put your end tag in, it won't know when to stop and, to use the example above, will simply display all your text in bold. That isn't always the case, but we'll come to that a bit later on.

Put your two tags together, plop some info (or content) in between them, and you've got yourself a fully functioning element. When you know how to put an element together, everything else should be pretty straight forward.

There are literally tonnes of elements in HTML, giving instructions on everything from where to place an image on your page to what colour your background should be, what size your text should be, when a new paragraph starts and a whole lot more.

But we're keeping it simple here, right? We can talk about that sort of stuff at another time. For now, we'll concentrate on the very basics of HTML and how you can use it to put a very simple page together.

So here goes.

HTML is best written in your basic Notepad programme, so open yours up and follow the next few paragraphs step-by-step. By the time we're done, you'll have a basic web page.

To start with, you'll need to tell your browser that it's going to be looking at some HTML.

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