Your First HTML Page

What is HTML?

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is what the majority of web pages on the internet are written in. Though not considered a programming language, you will be a bit of a programmer after writing your first page. Hey-Don't worry! This won't be hard at all and it's not going to hurt a bit! Writing an HTML page just requires you to learn a few rules and make sure you don't go around breaking them all the time. Let's start Your First HTML Page!

Web Pages and Web Browsers

Any HTML page you see on the web is comprised completely of text. Now of course you can see all kinds of crazy things on them such as animations and music, but that's because somewhere in the HTML code there was an instruction to display an animation or play music. Confused? To say it another way, an HTML page is all text, and is really basically a bunch of instructions to do this or do that, (i.e. display images, display links and so forth). Then you have browsers that take HTML pages and interpret those instructions to actually display images, display links, and so on. Got it? So we need to start writing those instructions.

Getting Started

When writing HTML, you can use any text editing program but it's better to use the ones with the least frills. So let's stay away from Word and try using Notepad. You can find the program on your computer by clicking Start, then clicking Run and typing "notepad" without the quotes. (If you’re on a Mac, use SimpleText).

Start the Coding!

Every HTML page has the same basic framework so we'll start there. HTML is basically made up of tags, which are words enclosed by < and >. Here is the basic framework for an HTML page. Go ahead and type this into your program and save it as index.html.

<html>

<head>
</head>

<body>
</body>

</html>

Though it may not be initially apparent from this small example, tags in HTML often serve as containers, meaning they will contain other tags. For instance, look at the <html> tag. In it, is the entire contents of an html page, (which are contained in the <head> and <body> tags). Though we haven't actually typed anything in. Another important thing to note here is that just about everything needs to be closed off. If you see <html>, you have to end it with </html> somewhere later on. Remember that, it's important. So let's dissect this further. In the <head> section lies a multitude of things that go unseen, but often it will just contain the title of the webpage enclosed in the appropriate tags, <title></title>. In the <body> tags, we have the meat of our page...The text that appears, the images, and so on. By the way, if you were to load this page into a browser now, you would see a blank page. We have to put something in it! Continue on to finish Your First HTML Page!

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1, Page 2 (Finishing Your First HTML Page)

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