HTML

The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the standard language used to create documents for the World Wide Web. It's main feature is the use of embedded instructions or descriptive elements called tags, to specify the structure of a document. These tags allow for the basic layout of the page and create links to other HTML pages or to files in other medias (documents in other formats, sound files, graphics, and so on).

HTML is an extensible language, meaning new functionality to the language is added without 'breaking' older documents or browsers (new HTML elements are typically ignored by browsers that do not support or recognize them).

Markup Languages

HTML is known as a logical or structural markup language, and is not so much concerned with the appearance of a document as it is about its structure. Markup languages like Rich Text Format (RTF), Postscript, and other word processing file types, focus mainly on the formatting in a document (such as the typefaces and styles, exact position of illustrations, margin size).

A logical markup language is used to describe the structure of the document, and allows an application that views it to interpret much of the formatting. For example, you use HTML to mark headings, paragraphs, or lists. This also allows the language to be much more distributable, in that it's not bound to any specific operating system's features.

HTML is an implementation (a subset to some degree) based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and it's reasonable enough to expect to type it in directly without using a specialized editor. HTML editors can be useful, but are not necessary for creating Web pages.

For a list of available editors, see:
http://www.bev.net/computer/htmlhelp/editor.html

You'll also find a review of many of the current editors at:
http://www.techsmith.com/community/htmlrev/index.html

HTML Tags and Elements

HTML tags provide the instructions that describe to the browser what that part of the document means or to perform an operation. A tag begins with an opening angle bracket or less-than sign (<) and ends with a closing angle bracket or greater-than sign (>).

A portion of an HTML document that has a start tag, a string of text, and an end tag, is known as an element. For example, <TITLE>My Page</TITLE> would be the title element of a page.

Tags are typically case-insensitive and usually come in pairs as start and end tags (such as <TITLE>My Page</TITLE>). End tags include a forward slash (/). An element such as the break (<BR> -- used to insert a line break) is an example of a tag that does not need an end tag, so it's considered to be an empty tag.

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