HTML Basics

Many questions need to be answered first to help you get started to check out what some commonly used terms mean:

HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language is the language WWW hypertext documents are written in. It features hypertext links where you click on a string of highlighted text and access a new document which can transport you to a site or anywhere else in the world. The new document is located by it's URL and can be another HTML document, pictures, sound files etc. HTML is designed to be platform  independent, not bound to a particular hardware or software environment.

HTML programs are written as plain, ASCII text files. This means they can be written in any text editor such as Write or Notepad. To test how a HTML program is displayed in a browser, the best way is to open the HTML file from a browser. For example, open Netscape, then go File --> Open file then find your HTML file on your hard drive.

HTML requires you construct documents with an emphasis on the structure of the text and leave the appearance of your document up to the browser displaying the document (so you don't have complete control of how is looks).

What is an HTML editor?
The editor is an application wherein you write the HTML code. Any text editor can double up as your HTML editor. Incidentally, the humber Notepad, which shipped with all versions of Windows, is one of the most widely used HTML editors around. (However, if you do work in Notepad, you will need to be well-versed with HTML tags). For those who desire a little more power and flexibility, HotDog Professional, a HTML enhanced text-editor available at http://www.sausage.com is a must. In addition, there are numerous commercial HTML editors such as Adobe Pagemill www.adobe.com/prodindex/pagemill or Microsoft FrontPage 2000 available at http://www.microsoft.com/fp2000, which provides a "What - you - see - is - what - you - get" authoring environment. 

What is an Internet Browser:
A browser essentially an HTML viewer, which interprets the embedded formatting codes in the HTML document, and displays it accordingly. The two most popular ones are IE at www.microsoft.com and Netscapte Communicator at www.netscape.com, which is my personal favorite and Neoplanet, available at www.neoplanet.com is one of the upcoming ones. 

Web Space
Once you've conceptualized and completed your website, you need output it up on the Internet for people to admire. So you now need to find and address on the Web, a home away from home for your digital masterpiece. Geocities at http://geocities.com offers 11 MB of free Webspace, together with numerous other goodies to make your Web page stand out from the rest. Other free Webspace providers include http://www.tripod.com, http://www.xoom.com, http://freeservers.com

This bring us to the end of this section. Now that you know some of the jargon used, we could start off with some basic HTML programming in the next sections.