HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.
What Is HTML : Hypertext means a simple and ordinary text that is been decorated with some extra features such as formatted images, multimedia and links.
Markup is the process of taking ordinary text and symbols.
Example: when a student studies, he marks up some text as IMP i.e. important, VIMP i.e. very important or ASKED IN specifies the year that topic is asked in. These symbols are a type of markup.
Each symbol used for markup in HTML instructs the browser about how to display the text.
Language defines that HTML is a computer language having its own syntax, expressions, and rules to communicate with the end user. However, HTML is NOT a programming language; it’s just a markup language.
HTML’s Goal: To be a Universal Language
The only thing HTML does is it tells a browser how to display the text. This allows the documents to be displayed attractively and correctly on many different kinds of platforms.
HTML is designed to work on a wide variety of platforms. Not just on computers but also on a wide variety of graphical workstations, dumb terminals, network computers, hand-held devices, TV sets, game consoles, digital watches, and text to speech machines.
What are the Advantages of HTML
- Flexible: As it is platform independent, browser independent and not dependent on any particular piece of software and can be written in any text editor, you can work with HTML any where and on any machine.
- Structural building up : HTML allows using of tags from ground up i.e. systematic use of start and end tags and which tag/attribute to be used with in what.
- Free of cost: Working on HTML doesn’t cost you even a cent.
- It is simple.
- It is case-insensitive.
- It has hypertext i.e. the text having ability to connect to the other text.
- It has the features like tables and applets.
What are the Disadvantages of HTML
- Dynamic web pages cannot be created with HTML: HTML is a static web technique, that is one can only see information, but no interaction between the user and server.
- HTML doesn’t pass information to pages: It cannot maintain states as it doesn’t support sessions or cookies and such.
- All the browsers may not support all the tags of HTML..
HTML Key Points
Few important things we should be aware of to begin with HTML are:
Internet: It is the network of computers used to view the information spread over worldwide. It was started in US in 1969. The first internet is ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Agency).
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol)
protocols: These protocols are a set of network rules that are used to communicate with the system in the network.
Web page: It consists of normal text and HTML tags interpreted by the browser. A static web page is stored using the file extension .htm or html. Web pages are useful as it is:
- Cheap and easy medium of spreading information to a large audience.
- A medium to market/advertise your business.
- Used to create our own personal website.
Website: It is a collection of related web pages.
Browser: Browser is software used to view the web page. There are varieties of browsers like Internet explorer, Netscape navigator, Netscape gold, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, etc.
Web server: A web server is a machine or system which provides services related to web. It is software or program that allows publishing web pages over WWW. Few examples of web servers are IIS, Apache server and PWS.
HTML Tags
Tag is used to specify “mark-up” regions of HTML documents for the web browser to interpret. Tags are enclosed in angular brackets i.e. ‘<‘ & ‘>’.
A completed tag is termed an element. Element is a complete tag having 3 major parts: opening tag, content and closing tag.
Example: <BODY> Learning HTML </BODY>
Collection of HTML elements make up an HTML document. These elements are defined using the HTML tags and the location of appearance of elements is defined by the order in which the tags are written.
By adding a tag, you instruct the web browser how to display text and graphics on a web page. A web browser reads an HTML document top to bottom, left to right and displays accordingly.
There are basically two types of tags:
- Singular ptag or empty tag: A tag which does not have It is also known as opening tag. any end tag.
Syntax:
<tagname> or <tagname/>
Example:
<hr>, <br>
- Paired tag or container tag: A tag which has starting tag as well as ending tag is called as paired tag. The ending tag is same as starting tag only prefix with front slash.
Syntax:
<tagname> text </tagname> Example:
<html> and </html>
Basic Structure of HTML
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<<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>TITLE OF HTML DOCUMENT</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> ACTUAL CONTENTS OF WEB PAGE DOCUMENT </BODY> </HTML> |
Every HTML document starts with an <html> tag and ends with </html> tag. This tag tells the browser where the document begins and where it ends.
The HTML document is divided into 2 sections i.e. head and body i.e. inside <html> and </html> there is <head>……</head> and <body>……</body> tags.
- Inside <head> and </head> tags there are <title> …… </title> tags which display the title of the document in the web browser’s title bar
- Inside <body> and </body> actual contents of html document art placed.
Example:
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<!–This is my first HTML page. –> <html> <head> <title>First HTML page</title> </head> <body> I am Learning HTML And will do lot of experiments with various HTML tags </body> </html> |