Wednesday, 5 September 2012


HTML Basics:
Webpages are written in HTML - a simple scripting language.

HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language.

·          Hypertext is simply a piece of text that works as a link.
·          Markup Language is a way of writing layout information within documents.
·          Basically an HTML document is a plain text file that contains text and nothing else. 


When a browser opens an HTML file, the browser will look for HTML codes in the text and use them to change the layout, insert images, or create links to other pages. Since HTML documents are just text files they can be written in even the simplest text editor.

A more popular choice is to use a special HTML editor - maybe even one that puts focus on the visual result rather than the codes - a so-called WYSIWYG editor ("What You See Is What You Get").

Why Learn HTML:
It is possible to create webpages without knowing anything about the HTML source behind the page. There are excellent editors on the market that will take care of the HTML parts. All you need to do is layout the page. 

The most important benefits are: 

1.        You can use tags the editor does not support.
2.        You can read the code of other people's pages, and "borrow" the cool effects.
3.        You can do the work yourself, when the editor simply refuses to create the effects you want.

All you need to do is type in the code, then save the document, making sure to put an .html extension or an .htm extension to the file (for instance "mypage.html"). 

Tags
Basically, a computer sees an "A" as simply an "A" - whether it is bold, italic, big or small.

To tell the browser that an "A" should be bold we need to put a markup in front of the A.

Such a markup is called a Tag.
All HTML tags are enclosed in < and >.

Example: a piece of text as it appears on the screen. 

This is an example of bold text.


HTML: the HTML for the above example:
This is an example of <b>bold</b> text.

As you can see, the start tag <b> indicates that whatever follows should be written in bold. The corresponding end tag </b> indicates that the browser should stop writing text in bold.

Page structure:

All normal webpages consist of a head and a body. 
·          The head is used for text and tags that do not show directly on the page.
·          The body is used for text and tags that are shown directly on the page.
 Finally, all webpages have an <html> tag at the beginning and the end, telling the browser where the document starts and where it stops.

The most basic code - the code you will use for any page you make, is shown below:


head
Body

 
 


<html>
                <head>
                                <!-- This section is for the title and technical info of the page. -->
                </head>
                <body>
                                <! -- This section is for all that you want to show on the page. -->
                </body>
</html>
 

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