Intro to HTML
A web page is a file that ends in html (hyper-text markup language). A browser renders its contents into a web page.
HTML is the language of web sites. It it not a programming language because you cannot run loops and logic. It is what's known as a markup language. It's purpose is to define the structure of a website, not how it looks. How it looks is defined using style sheets (more of that later).
Elements of a web page are declared via opening and closing tags. For example, the web page title might be written as:
HTML, Head and Body
All html files start and end with the <html></html> tag that tell a browser to expect to see html. Within the <html> block there are two others, the <head></head> and <body></body>
The <head> block contains things like the page title, links to external libraries that let you programme a web page, and meta data that does things like tell search engines what kind of content your website contains.
The <body> block contains the actual contents of the website, links, images, titles etc.
Hello Word
So the most basic website you can imagine would look like this:
Creating Your First HTML File
Since a web page is just a bunch of text that a browser uses to build a web page, we can use a simple text editor to create a basic web page.
On a Mac, open the Text Editor (command-shift >> type text editor). On a PC, open notepad.
The Text Editor by default writes files in a format called Rich Text Format (.rtf). We don't want that, it's rubbish and browsers don't understand it. So step 1 is to tell the Text Editor to write in plane text.
Under the Format menu, select Make Plain Text
We can now past in our Hello World example
Save the file somewhere easy to find but replace the .txt at the end of the file with .html. You will get a warning but click Use .html to save your first HTML file.
Navigate to the file in Finder and open it to see your first web page.
Extension: Explore what other HTML tags a browser can understand.
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