What is HTML?
What is HTML? The question that burns the minds of many people. HTML is the most basic website coding language. It is used to manipulate the webpage so it will display the way you want it onto the screen of the viewer.
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML, as stated above, is a computer language for creating webpages. All webmasters and/or mistresses use HTML in one form or another. HTML is a basic manipulator of background colors or images, text color, link color, etc.
All commands, or tags, are surrounded by brackets < > (Sometimes called less then or greater than signs.) This is true for all tags. If you forget an opening or closing bracket, an error will occur.
Inbetween the brackets, you put the tag name and an attribute. Not all tags have attributes but most of them do. An attribute can change certain aspects of the tag. It looks like this:
<tagname attribute="value">
All but a few tags must be followed by a closing tag in order to tell the browser where to end the command. A closing tag is the tagname in brackets with a slash before it.
<tag attribute="value"> Content Here </tag>
This is the basic format of all tags.
The Skeleton
HTML has a basic skeleton in order for the page to show up correctly. It consists of the HTML, head, title, and body tags. You would set it up like so:
<html>
<head>
<title> Title of Page Goes Here </title>
</head>
<body>
Content Goes Here....
</body>
</html>
First we see the html tag. That defines the document as an HTML document. Then, the head tags which contain certain tags that will be discussed later in the guide. It also contains the title tag. The title tag contains the title of the page. The title bar is the blue bar at the top of your browser with the 'x' and minimize buttons to the far right. Next comes the body tag. The content goes in between the opening and closing body tags. This is where other tags are palced to change the style of the HTML in ways such as font, color, background, and others. Lastly, we close up the body and HTML tags to finish our page.
This "skeleton" is required for every page to show correctly.
Spacing
In a web page, there is no format. The browser ignores all blank lines in your code. The most it will pick up is one or two spaces. There are certain tags you use to change spacing.
<body> Hello There. This is totally awesome. </body>
This will appear all on one line of the webpage like this: Hello there. This is totally awesome. To create a break in between the two lines, add a <br /> where you want the break to occur.
<body> Hello there. <br /> This is totally awesome. </body>
The br tag moves the "This is totally awesome." text to a new line. You can add more than one br tag to skip more than one line.
<body> Hello there. <p>This is totally awesome.</p> </body>
The paragraph or p tag skips one line above and below as if creating a paragraph.
HTML isn't the only language out there. There is CSS, Java Script, PHP, MySQL and others that help you to customize and organize your site.