HTML GUIDE PAGE 2

WHAT IS HTML?

HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language.
This will probably mean nothing to you at the moment and possibly never will - after 12 months of webbing, it still means nothing to me! It's just one of those acronyms that everyone says because it sounds cool - still, its good to know what all the letters stand for.

Fortunately, complexity ends here, as far as HTML goes, and the language itself is extremely simple. Infact, I am very reluctant to call HTML an actual computer langauge, since it has no obvious syntax.
As a direct result of this, you do not need a compiler of any sorts to see the result of your 'program', only a web browser.

The HTML language is made up of a catalogue of commands, which you can insert into a text document. These commands (known as tags) instruct the web browser how to manipulate the text within that document on the screen.

What is a tag?
So that the browser can distinguish between tags and the text you want displayed, each tag name is given between pointed brackets, like so : <tag name>

So, when a browser comes across a set of pointed brackets, it reads the tag name from inside them, finds its function from the catalogue of recognised tags and then performs that particular task.

For the vast majority of tags, the tag's function will be to instruct the browser to show all subsequent text in a particular style (eg in bold letters or in a different colour).
In order to end this process, and return the text back to normal, you will need to cancel the orginal command. This is done by repeating the tag with a forward slash before its name, like so :

.. normal text .. <tag name> .. new style of text .. </tag name> .. normal text ..

This type of tag is called a container because all of the text contained within the two tags is formatted in a particular way.

The second type of tag is alot rarer than the container (I can only name about 5 or 6). Instead of altering text output, the tag tells the browser to place an 'object' on the screen.
Examples of such objects are images, horizontal rulers, new lines, blank lines, etc.
As a result, such tags do not need to be followed by a cancellation tag.

If you are so far confused, then don't worry.
All this will become clearer once you see some of the tags in action.