Introduction
to HTML
Are you feeling
a bit overwhelmed by the task of creating your own web site?
Well, you're
not alone! At Hosting Marketers we understand that a large majority of
new webmasters haven't the slightest clue about how to use HTML code to
create a functional, attractive, web site, and that's why we have created
our Introduction to HTML piece.
HTML is not
actually all that difficult, and if you understand the logic behind it,
you will be on your way in no time!
HTML stands
for Hyper Text Markup Language, and all web pages are written in HTML.
Despite the
fact that some web pages today may have different file extensions (such
as .cfm or .asp), their core is still rooted in HTML. In reality, HTML
is not real computer language such as C++ or Pascal, but rather merely
a system for describing documents.
A web browser
interprets the HTML code lines and displays it as specified by the code.
HTML is a special version of SGML focused on Hypertext.
HTML code is
written in ASCII format, which is a big advantage to users, because ASCII
can be read by all major platforms including IBM, Macintosh, UNIX, among
others.
This allows
the web to be usable for users of all platforms, as long as the user has
a web browser.
The current
standard defined by he W3 Consortium for web documents today is HTML 4.0,
however, HTML originally began with HTML 1.0, which was the language used
by Mosaic, the first popular web browser.
At that time,
HTML was by no means the official standard, but was officially released
as HTML 2.0, which remains the most basic standard for web pages.
Pages created
in HTML 2.0 can still be viewed in any browser. HTML 3.0 was flawed and
replaced by HTML 3.2, which is still used by many today.
With the introduction
of Cascading Stylesheets and HTML 4.0, HTML has returned to its origins.
In reality,
HTML is meant to be a structural language, not a formatting language,
and tags for formatting text, like <font> or <b>, were
officially declared "obsolete" by the W# Consortium. |
