It seems today that everyone has a web page. Companies, individuals, and even pets can be found with just a few clicks of a mouse. A multitude of free hosting services abound, many with website generators where you simply type in what you want and it puts the page together for you. But did you ever wonder exactly how the web page is put together in the first place?
The answer is HTML. HTML, an acronym that stands for "HyperText Markup Language," is the standard language that is used to create the backbone for most websites that you see on the web today. Of course, HTML is limited in what it can do. A variety of newer languages, including JavaScript, DHTML, XHTML, and XML, have been developed to meet the needs of the various denizens of the World Wide Web, but in most cases, they still use HTML as both a starting point and a tool to create the finished product.
The way that HTML works is simple. First, the web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, or any other browser you might choose) identifies the file as an HTML file. It identifies it by the filename extension-the letters that come after the dot in the name of the file (an example: in the file, "index.html", the ".html" is the extension). HTML documents will have an extension of either .html or .htm, though the former is the more common (and technically correct) way to do it. Some browsers are unable to correctly recognize the .htm extension, though the number of incompatible browsers is declining by the day.
At the top of the file, there is a single line that reads , with one at the very end reading . These lines identify everything between them as being written in the HTML language. Once a browser identifies the file as an HTML file, it begins looking in the Head of the document for information on how to format it. The "Head" is a section at the top of the document after the "HTML" line. It is set apart by the words "
" and "." That tells the browser that it contains information on how to format the document. All of this information is contained in tags (much like "head" and "/head"). Common tags include "Title" (telling the browser what to put in the blue bar at the top of the window) and "Meta" (special tags that help search engines find the site).
After reading the "Head" information, the browser then looks to the "Body" (contained in "body" tags). The "Body" tags tell the browser that it has found the actual content of the page, including information on background colors, images, and any text or links that may appear on the page. Special tags are used for each of these, including "img" (used to designate where a certain picture or image appears), "A href" and "/a" (used to create links to other web pages), "p" and "/p" (used to designate a block of text as a paragraph), and "br /" (used to indicate a line break.) Other, more complex tags can be used to create special page effects like tables and frames, make text bold, underlined, or italicized.
Of all of the computer languages out there, HTML can be one of the easiest to learn and master. While there are limits to basic HTML, the variety of other languages which build upon it makes sure that the design of your web pages is limited only by your imagination.
