HTML is HyperText Markup Language. Hypertext because it is more than text, and markup language because it is a language for marking pieces of text. HTML is the language of web browsers. Using HTML, you describe how your document is structured so that web browsers can display it appropriately. Unlike normal desktop publishing, with HTML you only work in generalities, if you know what you’re doing. Rather than specifying exactly what your document looks like, you specify which parts of the document are important, and in what way they’re important. The reader’s browser then takes that information and creates a web page, regardless of whether that browser is a graphical browser on Windows, a text-based browser on Unix, or a voice reader for the blind.
When writing HTML, you surround various parts of the text with descriptions of what added meaning you want the text to convey. For example, if you want a word to be emphasized, you surround that word with the ‘emphasis’ HTML code. Almost all HTML ‘markup’ is done by surrounding the words with the code that affects it. The beginning tag is always a word, such as “em”, surrounded by the greater than and less than symbol: <em>. The ending tag is the same thing, but with a slash added: </em>.
There are two forms of HTML: HTML and XHTML. I’ll be using XHTML here, but will try to point out the differences with HTML, and why you would use one or the other.
