Learning HTML

HTML is the language for building web pages on the World Wide Web. It stands for HyperText Markup Language. There are also many other languages to build web pages, such as XHTML, XML, CSS, and etc. It was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, who now is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is like the United Nations of the web. It works to make the web universal and open to all. One way to do that is to make every page look the same, even with different browsers, like AOL (Netscape or American Online), Bellsouth, and (my browser) Mozilla Firefox, which is one of the main reasons why the W3C was founded.

The Basics

The first thing you need to know is the basic outline of a webpage. There's the "Head", the "Title", and the "Body". You write a webpage just like you you do a letter, but there are some guild lines. When you save a web page, in wordpad or notepad, you save it with the extension .htm or .html instead of .doc or .exe. Now don't get too confused, we'll take this one step at a time.

The first thing you always write when writing a webpage is the tag <HTML>, it tells the browser what languge your writing in. A tag is a command that tells the computer what to do with is content. As you can see, tags are wrote with less than and greater than signs on each end, which is located on the second and third key to the left of the shift key. Now, as I said in the beginning, the basic layout is the "Head", the "Title", and the "Body"(shown below).

*****By the way, You don't have to write tags in uppercase, that's just for show lol, that confused when I was learning*****

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
(can be anything, even with symbols) </TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
(content goes here)
</BODY>
</HTML>

Tags mirror each other, when you write tags they need to be like a hamburger (with two pieces of bread mirroring each other with the burger in the middle). So, when you write the tag <HEAD> and <TITLE> it should end with </TITLE> and </HEAD>. Once again, you can see that a tag ends with the forward slash, which is located on the first key to the left of the shift key. In between the tag <TITLE> (<TITLE>here</TITLE>) you write the web site's name (like mine, ---»De-Railed Productions«--- (VERSION 1.0) A.K.A.:---»De-Railed Productions«--- (VERSION 1.0), the way it's written in the code), and it will show on the tool bar. When you write it, don't put the greater than and less then signs because text is not a tag, it's the content, as are pictures, videos, forms, and links(but only those can go in the body, the title can only have text and symbols). Now I'm going to tell about the tag <BODY>. In the "Body", all the content you want to be "IN" the window is put in here, like pictures, links, tables, movies, text, and etc. In order to tell the computer where and how to put the content on the screen, you need to use tags.

Now that you now the basic layout of a web page you can start learning tags.

Text ¦ Images ¦ Links ¦ Tables ¦

If you need any extra help in learning HTML you can go to HTMLGoodies.com or go to Pootato.org( it may have a weird name, but it's a great site!).