This page is part of the WebCom HTML Guide. It provides a brief overview of HTML, (Hyper Text Markup Language).

HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, requires no knowledge of programming to use, and is extremely simple to use in its basic form. An HTML document consists of nothing more than a plain text file with simple codes inserted into it. These codes, or "tags", instruct the viewing program (most likely a Web browser) to format sections of text, display images, and create hotlinks (connections) to other documents and files. No programming is involved at any point.

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A HTML document is formatted by enclosing sections of a plain text file between opening and closing tags. This is an example of a tag: <TAG>. Most tags come in pairs, with the closing tag preceeded by a forward slash "/", like this: </TAG>.

Tags define how the section of text they enclose will be displayed, create connections to other documents and files, such as multimedia documents like video clips and sound files, and cause images to be displayed within a document.

The final appearance of a document is dependent on the program used to view it, the browser. Depending on the Web browser used, the final appearance of a document may vary significantly.

This page, for example, may be viewed using a text mode browser (such as Lynx), or a graphical browser (such as Mosaic). In the latter case, it may occupy the entire screen, or just a portion, be wider than it is tall, or vice versa, top level headings (such as the one at the start of this page) may be displayed using an extremely large font, or be only slightly larger than the text following, but heavily bolded.

This is called "logical" markup: instead of specifying individual fonts, sizes and spacing, the designer of a HTML document inserts tags which indicate the "logical" representation of the document. For example, to create the heading at the top of this page, tags are inserted around it saying "this is a level one heading", instead of "this piece of text should be displayed in 18 point Helvetica bold with so much space before it and so much space after it". The details are left up to the browser.

All HTML code (the tags, not the file references) in this guide (and most of the code on WebCom) is CAPITALIZED. Why? Because this causes it to stand out from the text of the document itself when you are editing the original plain-text file, making the process of locating errors easier. We recommend following this standard in all of your documents.

If you are using a graphical user interface (such as Windows or the Macintosh), there are a number of tools available that will allow you to create HTML documents in your computer's native environment. However, because HTML documents are just plain text files, they can be created and modified with simple text editors, such as notpad on Windows and TeachText on the Mac.

Want to learn more? See the WebCom HTML guide.