Section 2 - Introduction to HTML

Contents:

Overview of the HyperText Markup Language

What is a text markup language?

A markup language is a way of describing, using instructions embedded in a document, what the text means and should look like.

A markup language might have commands:

[start_bold] my markup language [end_bold]

this means: "turn on boldface, write ’my markup language’ and then turn off boldface"

A markup language has many such codes to allow for rich description of the document content and desired rendering.

Using Reveal Codes command in WordPerfect shows unprintable characters which is the actual markup command.

HTML is simply a markup language use the view source command on a browser designed to specify the logical organisation of a text document with the important extension that allows for hypertext links from one document to another, and user interaction.

The client web browser interprets these marked elements to display the document - this enables different browsers to display the same html document in the same logical makeup on very different machines - from PCs to UNIX machines.
HTML is extensible - functionality can be added to the language, without "breaking" older documents that don’t use the new features. HTML 1 -> HTML 4

Overview of the HyperText Markup Language

HTML looks just like a plain text document with tags enclosing sections of text.

</HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>my first HTML</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<H1>this is my first web page!<H1>
<BR>it just looks like a plain text document with TAGS
</BODY>
</HTML>

You can prepare a HTML document using a simple text editor NotePad on PCs or Text Pad on Unix.

Conclusion
In this lecture you have:

built on your understanding of the WWW and HTML.

been introduced to the web model, including URLs, HTTP and HTML.

learnt what a markup language is.

In the next lecture we will look into the structure of the language and you will create your first web page in an HTML editor.