History of HTML

A few decades ago we didn't have computers and printers in our homes. It was necessary to type publications in a text-typewriter then send it out to a print shop. People would write notes in the margins using a blue pen that wouldn't show up during the print process. The notes told the print shop things like font size, bold or italic text, etc. It also was use to make a note of where images should be inserted. Before long, standards were developed for these notes and SGML or "Standard Generalized Markup Language" was born.

A first look at HTML

SGML was actually the inspiration for HTML or Hypertext Markup Language. HTML files are simple text along with instructions as to how the text should appear or where graphics should be inserted. We couldn't exactly write in the margins this time to it was decided that all html instructions called "tags" would be inclosed with in angle brackets like this <tag>. How about a few examples:

<b>This text is bold</b> results in This text is bold
<i>This is in italics</i> results in This text is in italics

By now you've noticed that most HTML tags come in pairs. The <b> turned on bold text. The closing </b> turned it off. Closing tags always have the / slash. Likewise <i> and </i> created italicized text between the two tags. Some people think of opening and closing tags as the bread in a sandwich with all of the text the tags are applied to in between.

But why HTML?

HTML files can end in .htm or .html. They are very small because they only contain text. During this class, we'll be using a text editor like Windows Notepad to write our HTML. You may wonder why we don't just use FrontPage or something like it. These tools let us drag and drop and they write the HTML for us. If we know HTML ourselves, we'll have complete control over our web pages regardless of how they were created. If you use FrontPage or Dreamweaver, you'll find it very handy to be able to look at the HTML code and make sense of it when troubleshooting problems. Just remember, in this class we're writing HTML using Windows Notepad, Mac SimpleText or another text editor.

A basic HTML document

There are a few elements that you'll find in all HTML documents. First, the entire document has to be sandwiched between opening and closing <html> and </html> tags. This tells the browser to look for HTML code and to distinquish it from text.

There are two parts to each HTML document, a header part enclosed in <head> and </head> commands and a body part enclosed in <body> and </body> tags. There are a few special items that go into the header part of the document. But most of the HTML you write will be in the body. With this said, let's look at the first real HTML document:

<html>
<head>
<title>Title goes here</title>
</head>
<body>
Text, graphics and everything else you want on your web page goes here.
</body>
</html>

Notice that each tag is part of a matched set with both opening and closing tags. This is a good time to mention that the text between the title tags appears on the top menu bar of your browser when your page is loaded. You won't see it within the page itself.

Believe it or not, HTML doesn't get too much harder than this.