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a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
As explained before, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a language that bridges the gap between the content the human wants to display and the computer which needs to interpret it from text alone. But what exactly does that all mean, and how does it work?
As a markup language, HTML is actually a set of instructions telling the computer what parts of the document mean what: this piece of text is a heading, that word is emphasised, these sentences are in a paragraph, this word is a link that points to that file. Your browser looks at the marked-up text and displays it as a formatted document instantly. As a bonus, the language is also designed to be readable to humans when written cleanly and correctly.
HTML is both the most boring and most interesting part of making a website. It's easy to write text and it's simple to wrap it in the relevant tags—the language itself is only a step above plain text documents. Still, laying down these building blocks and then working from there can have great effects.
HTML is not for visual effects. HTML only encodes content and meaning. However, combined with CSS, you can do just about anything.