First lesson in HTML

In the process of constructing a website, HTML is vital and almost irresistible. Though there are ways of making your website without the knowledge of any web development language, knowing HTML will surely change the way you look at things on web.

Let’s hail the mighty Hyper Text Markup Language (yea that’s what HTML is really called).Though knowing this full form is not mandatory but using it in the geek world can bring you unprecedented respect.

In the prehistoric times when web was a luxury and was uncertain of its future, HTML saved the day for it. Though it wasn’t as funky as it is today.

So what is this HTML?

Let’s now break it down and try to understand this lamely named language.

HyperText-Well it’s not the dancing or jumping text (to lower your excitement).You’ll find its analogies in science fiction. It’s same as using worm holes to travel through space (not literally though).Hypertext means a type of text which contains hyperlinks (or just links for simplicity). It actually helps you to surf around on the internet. By using hypertext on WebPages you navigate your way through the network of web pages.

Markup-This piece of the puzzle draws its inspiration from a rather primitive concept. Writers mark their pages with funny looking symbols that tell printers to print a page in a particular way. That’s what HTML does mark data (text,multimedia.etc.etc) for your browser. So it can present it to you as you were a human (understandable by humans).

Language-you know what it is..so let’s move on.

Attention!!!!-HTML unlike any other common computer language can’t compute (hard to digest this fact hmm?).It does what other languages can’t do..Tag!!..(understood?..no.. then you will.. wait a moment).

HTML works on three basic components-

Tags, attributes and these two make the third one an element.

Tags- used to specify regions on a HTML document. The makeup part of HTML.example-<tagname>data</tagname>

Attributes- adding some love to your page. Attribute are used to modify the value of tags to make your data more presentable or desirable.