WWW or the World Wide Web is a vast resource of information over the Internet and all this information is available through webpages. But, have you ever wondered how these webpages are made? These web pages are designed using one of the most basic languages – the HTML. To begin, this lesson is devoted to introduction to HTML.
Fascinated by the concept? What if we say now that HTML is used to design the websites? A website? What is a website? Well, a website is a collection of web pages and all these pages are designed and linked together using HTML. So, it means that if you want to build a website, you should first definitely learn HTML without a second thought.
What is HTML?
Formally, HTML (also called the Hyper Text Markup Language) is a “markup” language that is used to design web pages on the internet. A markup language? Yes. But what is that? A language that uses the concept of tags. Tags are the commands to the web browser.
Note: A web browser is a software that you install in your computer, laptop, mobile or in your tablet to view web pages. Seems familiar? Can you try and give any example of a web browser? Just try once?
If you did, Good. But if you couldn’t just read on. Examples of web browsers are Google Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox etc. (see figure 1 which shows the icons of some of the leading web browsers).
Task 1: Just go and browse the internet to search for the web browser which has maximum user base.
Back? Great! your introduction to HTML beginat tags. Well, tags are the commands to the web browser. These commands tell the browser how to display the content to the user. For example, when you work in any word processing package, you give commands to it to format your text such as setting the font size. The command is given by selecting the corresponding option. Similarly, you have to tell the browser how you want your web page to display. Your page can have a combination of different elements like text, audio, video, graphics etc. Tags determine their how these elements will be rendered such as how the text should be formatted or images should be aligned etc.
Seems interesting? Yes, it indeed is.
Historical fact: The first official version of HTML was HTML 2.0 and the latest version is HTML 5.2. Interested in reading about history of HTML? Read here
Where do you type the HTML Code? – HTML Editors
There are a number of HTML editors available. You just have to type the HTML code as plain text. Easy. Right? Some of the widely used HTML editors are:
- Notepad, yes, your own little notepad available as an accessory in Windows
- Notepad++, again a Windows based editor. Linux users can also have it via Wine.
- Sublime Text
- Adobe Dreamweaver, provides with a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) environment.
Task 2: Browse you internet and identify which of these software is free, paid or open source.
Did you go and check? Great job! For now, you can even use your Notepad. It will be more than sufficient!
Note: Please complete the tasks first before proceeding further. Once done with this introduction to HTML, we are ready to jump to the world of website creation!