A Quick Intro to HTML

The World Wide Web is a subset of the Internet that allows mixed file formats-images, text, sound, etc.-to be transmitted and arranged in bulk. Programs that transmit and arrange are called browsers. The guide that tells a browser what is coming and how to arrange it is HyperText Markup Language, or HTML for short.

As hip as web-design is, writing in HTML is similar to using early word processors. HTML comprises tags that qualify text and give them extra attributes.

This line is bold.
The HTML for the line above looks like this:
<b>This line is bold.</b><br>

The angle brackets, <>, demark HTML code. The br at the end of the line stands for "break", and forces a carriage return to the next line. That tag is part of page formatting.

b is html for bold, and is part of text formatting. The /b indicates the end of the bold section. Other text formats like italics are analgous. What makes HTML special, however, is the ability to mark certain text as a hyperlink. Hyperlinks are the strands that form the web. Most likely, you see hyperlinks as underline blue text, and they seperate the Web from a magazine rack by allowing quick jumps between vastly different sources of information.

Hyperlink to my homepage.
The source for the link above looks like:
<a href="http://www.visi.com/~sgrantz">Hyperlink to my homepage. </a><br>

Here, the a tags anchor the enclosed text to an external source of information. The source is marked as type href or hypertext reference, and the Universal Resource Listing, or URL is enclosed in quotes. The absolute address of my homepage is there, complete with http, which indicates hypertext transfer protocol, the method the browser should use to grab the source listed in the reference.

That is enough jargon for my purposes. If you want to learn more about HTML, I suggest heading to the HTML Primer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It is an excellent source for learning HTML, and at the end of the document includes links to advanced topics such as Java, Forms, and dynamic HTML. I acheived my goal of introducing tags and the language.

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Last Updated: 5 May 1997
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