Introducing HTML

You write web pages in HTML - a simple scripting language. HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language.

HyperText is simply a piece of text that works as a link so that you can jump to another page. The fact that it is hyper just means it is not linear; you can go to any place on the Internet whenever you want by clicking on links. There is no set order to do things in
Markup is what HTML tags do to the text inside them. They mark it as a certain type of text (italicised text, for example)
HTML is a Language, as it has code-words and syntax like any other language

HTML is the language you use to format web pages. Your page can contain text, graphics, tables, links and multimedia files such as audio and video files.

HTML uses tags to go round your content to tell the browser how to display the page. The tags describe what the page looks like, which fonts to use, what colour text is, where paragraphs are and so on. If you want to make your text bold, add a picture or table, or add sound to your page, you use tags.

The browser formats the page according to the tags but, so far, browsers interpret HTML in their own sweet way so you have no guarantee that your page will look exactly like you want it to. And the page may well look different in different browsers.

The best place to start is a quick introduction about how to create a basic HTML page. If you want to jump straight to a particular section, select from the links on the right hand side of the page.

If you want more details, the best place to look for the most up-to-date and detailed HTML specification is on the W3C’s site. You can find it at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4. The specification is over 300 pages long and it isn’t the easiest read; but it is the definitive statement on the state of HTML (no matter what Microsoft would like you to think). Be very careful before you use some of the facilities that Microsoft uses (even if they are cool) because other browsers may not cope with them.

There is also a lot of other information on the W3C's site about standards, stylesheets, links to other useful pages and so on. Have a look at it.