To start with the basics, the full form of HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language. It is the language of the World Wide Web.
You can write and practice HTML and even view the pages without being connected to the internet. Lets start your first HTML page. Alright, first open a notepad document and type the following lines into it.
<HTML>
<BODY>
Hi...This is my first page!
</BODY>
</HTML>
Great, you have just written your first HTML code. Now to view your page, click 'Save as' in the 'File' menu. Save the file as 'first.html' without the quotes, in any directory of your choice. Now open the directory using Windows explorer. You can close the notepad file. You will find an Internet Explorer icon with the name 'First' under it. Double click it, and you will find this text that you typed in the code.
Hi...This is my first page!
Neat, huh!
Now, click the view menu and click on source, and you will see the code that you typed in earlier. This is the place that you will type in your HTML codes to edit your document.
Ok, now to explain the code.
This is the code that we had typed in...
<HTML>
<BODY>
Hi...This is my first page!
</BODY>
</HTML>
Any stuff within < and > (less than and greater than symbols) are HTML commands. They are called tags. Stuff outside these would just be placed on the HTML document.
Every HTML document start with <HTML> and ends with </HTML>, so that the computer knows that it is dealing with the HTML language. Almost every command in HTML had a canceling command which ends its action...like <HTML> ends with the same command but is preceded with a /(backslash)..</HTML>.
The next command <BODY> states that the actual BODY of the document is starting. There are a couple of commands that could be placed before the <BODY> command like <TITLE>, <HEAD>, <META>. Similar to the </HTML> command, we have the </BODY> to end the BODY of the document. The text after the <BODY> tag is just placed on the page. I know there is nothing so great about this page that we created, but this is just a start. You can make a page as exciting as you want it to be. Ok, on to the next commands.
Lets learn 3 new tags : <B>, <I>, and <TT>.
<B> makes the text bold. For example,
<B>This text is bold.</B>
produces this result...
This text is bold.
Any text between its opening and closing tag is made bold.
<I> tag stands for Italics. Any text within its opening and closing tag is changed to italics.
<I>This is in italics.</I> produces
This is in italics.
<TT> makes the text look like this... This is typewriter style!
