Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML is the basis of the Internet. If you want to create your own website, you need to learn HTML. We have already covered the tools you need to create HTML, so now I’ll share a little history about HTML and then you’ll see it in action.
A name that you might have heard or already know is Tim Berners-Lee, the father of HTML. In 1980 Berners-Lee, a physicist, decided tat he and his collegues needed a way to use and share documents via the Internet. Thus he proposed to create an Internet based hypertext system. In 1990 he specified HTML and wroted the browser and server software. Berners-Lee first publicly documented HTML in 1991 with HTML Tags. In the document, 20 tags were described and of those twenty 13 still remain.
Since then HTML has moved quite a ways, and now has a governing body which oversees the standardization of HTML. This body is called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and was formed in 1996. Because of the W3C and the ever increasing push to make the Internet simpler, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) were introduced to reduce load time and clean up HTML coding. I’ll speak more of CSS in a different article.
Now that you have a little knowledge about the history of HTML you need to know the basic tags to create a webpage. First open your source code editor, select a new document, save it as an html document, and proceed with the example below.
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Webpage</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My First Heading</h1>
<p>My first paragraph.</p>
</body>
</html>
When coding with HTML it is important to keep the ‹html›, ‹head›, ‹title› and ‹body› tags at the beginning of the document. While coding you must also remember to indent the tags as seen above. Indenting makes it easier for another programmer to easily read your code. In the example above you will also see . This is the closing part of the tag and must always happen. You should always close your tags, unless told otherwise, which will be discussed in a later article.
The tags that you see between the ‹body› tag are where the webpage content is represented.
The ‹h1› tag is the first of six numbering h1, h2, h3, etc. The ‹h› tag should wrap around the title of your content section. Also remember that the lower the number on a ‹h› tag means a larger font size.
The ‹p› tag is the paragraph tag which should be used to wrap around page content.
It might seem like a lot, but remember that you must always have closing tags, ‹html›, ‹head›, ‹title› and ‹body› tags in order to display any content. In the next article I’ll cover embedding images, tables, and links in your webpage. If you have any questions please email me.
Have fun and safe surfing.
