FAQs : What is HTML
and XHTML?
HTML , or HyperText Markup Language, is a simple markup
language used to make web pages.
Although all modern word processors and many specialized
tools can be used to make web pages without learning
HTML at all, learning HTML itself is a useful way to
learn more about the web and provides more control over
the results. Luckily, HTML is very simple and quite
easy to learn.
HTML was intended to be an instance of SGML, a general-purpose
markup language, but many HTML pages do not comply with
the requirements of SGML. XHTML, which supersedes HTML,
is a newer standard which complies fully with the requirements
of XML. XML itself is a further refinement of SGML.
Here is a simple example of an HTML document. To try
this out for yourself, simply create a new file called
mypage.html with any text editor, such as Windows notepad.
Paste in the HTML below, make any changes that please
you, and save the document. Then pick "open"
from the File menu of your web browser, locate the file
you have just made, and open it. If you make further
changes, you will need to "save" again and
then click "reload" or "refresh"
in your browser to see the results.
Of course, this is just a simple example. HTML can
do far, far more than this. A complete tutorial can
be found at Dave's
HTML Guide.
<title>Title of My Page Goes Here</title>
<h1>Heading Of My Page Goes Here</h1>
<a href="http://news.google.com/">Follow
this link to Google News</a>
<p>
Here is a picture of my cat:
</p>
<p>
<img src="cat.jpg" />
</p>
Notice that the HTML elements are simple enough to
recognize and nearly self-explanatory. The text between
the opening and closing <title> and </title>
elements becomes the title of the web page. The text
between the <h1> and </h1>elements is displayed
as a "level one heading," which is typically
a very large, bold font. The text between the opening
and closing <a> and </a> elements becomes
a link to another web page; the URL of the web page
to be linked to is found in the HREF attribute of the
<a> element as shown in the example above. The
<p> element encloses a paragraph.
The <img> element includes an image in your page;
the image is displayed at that point in the page, as
long as the image file specified by the URL in the SRC
attribute actualy exists. Since the SRC attribute I
used here contains a simple filename, the cat picture
will be shown as long as the file cat.jpg is in the
same directory as the page. The same trick can be used
in HREF attributes in <a> elements, to conveniently
link to pages in the same directory. For more information
about images and how to create them in formats appropriate
for the web, see the image file formats entry.
The <img> element has a / before the > to
signify that it is not a container and that no closing
</img> is expected.
Of course, a web page sitting in a file on your own
computer is not yet visible to anyone in the outside
world. See the setting up web sites entry to learn more
about how to create web sites that others can see.
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