What Is HTML?

April 14, 2020 HTML No Comments

HTML – stands for “Hyper Text Markup Language”

It’s the basic stuff web pages were written in years ago. Because the web pages were mostly static, this was a way to break up the monotony. You could and some color to your text and change the font size where you wanted. You could even link to other pages, either related or not related. Pretty cool (for then), now there is something called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to store all your web page formatting in one place.

This article will deal with the basics of HTML, and you can use the concepts to apply to CSS.

So when Google came around and had the idea to download the web, basically you could download the web page location (URL), and whatever it linked to, and eventually you would have an listing of all the web pages that linked to each other.

Of course, over time, that algorithm evolved because of ideas, like “what if we categorize the page by what the page is about?”, or “we can base the importance of a site by how many other pages link to it.” etc…

Here are some frequently asked question and answers according to Erik:

What is HTML in simple terms?

HTML is a way of displaying text in a web browser.

You can use HTML to “markup the text” with special tags to format the text the reader is reading.

As I wrote earlier, you can change the color of your text on the screen, or the size of certain letters, or even tell the web browser to show the font as bold, italic, or underlined.

What is HTML used for?

HTML is used to “markup” the plain text on a website and make it nicer to read. It gives you the ability to emphasize certain pieces of text on the screen by giving the text some color, changing the character (font) size, or making some other design changes.

What is HTML and how it works?

HTML uses “tags” which the browser understands to perform a certain action on the text the tags surround. Look for some example tags further down on this post.

What is HTML syntax?:

These are the main tags that you’ll use in your HTML documents. All your html files will have the same structure (4 tags and closing tags):

1. html
2. head
3. title
4. body

Here is an example of HTML syntax:

Notice that is follows a general structure or template, and you can just fill in the template.

<html>
  <head>
    <title></title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <!--this is a comment -->
  </body>
</html>

Here is one example of how HTML syntax can be used.

<font size='24 pts'>This font is 24 pts</font>

This font is 24 pts

*********************************************************************

Here are some other tags:

this is a ordered (numbered) list

Subaru
Honda
Toyota
BMW

this is a unordered (bulleted) list

Subaru
Honda
Toyota
BMW

these are paragraphs (1 blank line between each paragraph)

Paragraph 1

Paragraph 2

Paragraph 3

these are line breaks (normally it’s like pressing the “Enter” key on your keyboard) (but since this is WordPress, you will see the same effect as the “p” tag)
Line 1

Line 2

Line 3

<html>
  <head>
    <title>The Title Of This Page Is</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <!--this is a (comment) ordered (numbered) list -->
    <ol>
      <li>Subaru</li>
      <li>Honda</li>
      <li>Toyota</li>
      <li>BMW</li>
    </ol>
    
    <!--this is a (comment) unordered (bulleted) list -->
    <ul>
      <li>Subaru</li>
      <li>Honda</li>
      <li>Toyota</li>
      <li>BMW</li>
    </ul>

    <p>
    Paragraph 1
    </p>
    
    <p>
    Paragraph 2
    </p>

    <p>
    Paragraph 3
    </p>
    
    Line 1
    <br>
    Line 2
    <br>
    Line 3
        
        
  </body>
</html>

*********************************************************************
HTML is:

-A platform independent language (main platforms (that I know exist), windows, mac, linux, android, iphone, chromebook).
-HTML is not case sensitive language (upper and lower case, it’s all good :)).
-HTML allows you to define the page title, Ordered and unordered lists, defining paragraphs and line breaks, etc.
-HTML can controls fonts, colors, and positioning
-Using HTML we can build tables.

How do browsers work?

Browser’s work by rendering HTML marked up text files. The browser understands that files with a .htm or .hhml extension are web files that can be rendered by the web browser in rich text.

Is HTML coding?

HTML is not scripting or coding. It just marks up text.

We can use something like Javascript to code what the user’s desktop experience will be, and we can use Python or PHP to code for the server and make database connections, and activities.

We will be offering other examples in future articles.