What is HTML?

As we all know today, when we want to look at something on the World Wide Web (WWW), we use our browser program, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Firefox, etc. Browsers do not recognise Word documents, desktop publishing documents, spreadsheet files or anything else. They would not know how to display such files. However they do recognise documents created in a universal language called HTML. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and was created by the inventor of the Internet, Tim Berners Lee to give the public the ability to create web pages for themselves. The term markup stems from the printing industry. It refers to the days when a publishing editor would 'markup' an author's typed text so that the printer would know which words to make bold or italic, which size of type to use, say for chapter headings or footnotes, and so on.

Web authors must do this for themsleves. Not only do they type in the content of the document but also the markup telling the browser how the text must look.

The original concept of the WWW was to allow people reading one document to click on a word or phrase which was blue and underlined and, lo and behold!, that reference would show up on the screen. No need to amble down tothe local library or special libraries to find a copy of the reference. The blue and underlined text is called hypertext, it is ordinary text but has a link attached to it buried in the HTML source code which gives the Internet address of where the browser can find that page.

Here is an example of a hypertext link : Lets do a search on Google

HTML is not a programming language

HTML is not as a lot of people think an actual programming language. The reason I say this is because if it was a programming language we would know exactly how our page would display once we had finished coding. This is rarely ever the case due to the inconsistencies of browsers making certain web pages appear completley different from one to another. Therefore a lot of effort has to be put in by the designer to ensure that their code conforms to different browser standards if they want their web pages to appear the same on all browsers. Programming languages are very exact in what they do. HTML is not exact, in fact it is extremely unpredictable and will depend not only on the browser but also on its version. Programming usually tells a computer to do some type of function such as a complex calculation or move an image across a screen but HTML does nothin like this. All you can do it to tell the browser how you would like your text to look. Therefore HTML is in a sense just a text formatter. It relies on special tags to wrap our content up into certain readable elements.