HOME articles tutorials tool directory about

Introduction

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is called a text markup language because it works by taking plain text and adding formatting information (or, marking it up) using tags. It's easy to tell what is a tag and what isn't because the tags are enclosed in angled brackets, like this:

<TAG>

The other thing about tags is that, with a few exceptions, they come in pairs, with the text that should be affected by them in between. For example:

This text appears bold

produces This text appears bold

Notice that the second (or closing) tag has a / before the actual tag name. Whenever you see a tag with a / in it, you know it's the closing tag of a pair. Tags can be nested to create additional effects, like this:

This text appears bold and italic

produces This text appears bold and italic

Tip

You can view the HTML behind any Web page by right-clicking on the page and selecting View Source from the pop-up menu.

Although tags don't have to be written in all uppercase letters, people often write them that way to make them stand out from surrounding text.

HTML is all about using these tags to create well-organized, interesting documents for viewing on the Web. When the document is viewed in a plain text editor or HTML authoring tool, the tags are visible and the effects they create are not. But when that same document is viewed using a Web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, the opposite is true: the tags are hidden and the formatting created by them appears instead.

HOME articles tutorials tool directory about