If your new to creating websites the first thing you need to know if you want to code your own web site is HTML. HTML is a simple language to learn. The purpose of HTML is to tell your browser (like Firefox or Internet Explorer) how to display your page.
First HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. HTML consists of tags. Every tag begins with a < and ends with a >. For example <html>, <head>, <title>, <body>, <b>, and <br> are all HTML tags. Every web page consists of many of these tags. Most tags have a open tag and a close tag. An example of a open tag for bold text is <b> and a close tag for bold text is </b>. The difference between an open and a close tag is the / before name of the tag.
To create a web page you can use any text editor such as notepad. My favorite editor is called Notepad++. I use this editor because it 1) color your code and makes it easier to read, 2) it can be used for many languages other than HTML, and 3) it has many other functions that you can perform on your files.
To start you will need to create a file in your favorite text editor. You can name the file what ever you like but it must end in .html or .htm. I suggest keeping your file name to lower case characters. This is because some web servers (such as Linux servers) are case sensitive. For our example we will call our file index.html.
All HTML files start with the <html> tag and the end of the file is a </html> tag. So in our example our file now looks like this:
<html>
</html>
All this tells the browser is that the file has HTML content. All HTML files should have header information so you will need to add the open and close head tag <head> and </head>. So now we have
<html>
<head>
</head>
</html>
Next there is one important piece of information we want to put in our header of our file. If you look at the top of your browser you will see some thing like “Easy2Code: Learn how to code HTML. CSS, PHP and SQL”. This is the title of the page. The open and close title tags go between the open and close head tag. Between the title tags is the title you want to display. In our example we will title our page “Learning HTML”. So our page should now look like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Learning HTML</title>
</head>
</html>
Now we have created our HTML web page but there still is nothing displayed. This is where the robber hits the road. All the content for the web page needs to go between the body tags <body> and </body>. Between the body tags you can add whatever content you want people to see. We will keep it simple for now by adding some simple text. We will put the line “It is easy 2 code when you read the Easy2Code blog. Anyone can learn to code.” So now our file should look like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Learning HTML</title>
</head>
<body>
It is easy to code when you read the Easy2Code blog. Anyone can learn to code.
</body>
</html>
Remember how HTML is used to tell the browser how to display a web page? Lets try adding two more tags to see just how HTML does that. Lets add the open and close italicize tags (<i></i>) around the word “easy” and the bold tags (<b></b>) around the word “Easy2Code”. So now the file is now complete as below:
<html>
<head>
<title>Learning HTML</title>
</head>
<body>
It is <i>easy</i> to code when you read the <b>Easy2Code</b> blog. Anyone can learn to code.
</body>
</html>
You now can save your file. To open it in our default browser just double click your file wherever you saved it an you should see what you created. That is how to begin creating your first real website. It’s easy to code!
No user commented in " What is HTML? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback