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Modern Web Programming Tools and Techniques – I
Notes HTML is one language in a class of markup languages, the most general form of which is
Standard Generalized Markup Language, or SGML. Since SGML is complex, HTML was invented
as a simple way of creating web pages that could be easily accessed by browsers. HTML is a
special case of SGML.
HTML consists of tags and data. The tags serve to define what kind of data follows them, thereby
enabling the browser to render the data in the appropriate form for the user to see. There are
many tags in HTML, of which the few most important ones are introduced in this unit. HTML
files usually have the extension “.htm” or “.html”.
If you want to create Web pages, you need a tool to write the HTML code for the page. This can
be a simple text editor if you are hand-coding HTML. You also have sophisticated HTML editors
available that automate many (though not all) of the tasks of coding HTML. You also need a
browser to be able to render your code so that you can see the results.
1.1 HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. HTML provides a way of displaying Web pages
with text and images or multimedia content. HTML is not a programming language, but a
markup language. An HTML file is a text file containing small markup tags. The markup tags
tell the Web browser, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, how to display the page.
An HTML file must have an htm or html file extension. These files are stored on the web server.
So if you want to see the web page of a company, you should enter the URL (Uniform Resource
Locator), which is the website address of the company in the address bar of the browser. This
sends a request to the web server, which in turn responds by returning the desired web page.
The browser then renders the web page and you see it on your computer.
HTML allows Web page publishers to create complex pages of text and images that can be
viewed by anyone on the Web, regardless of what kind of computer or browser is being used.
Despite what you might have heard, you don’t need any special software to create an HTML
page; all you need is a word processor (such as Microsoft Word) and a working knowledge of
HTML. Fortunately, the basics of HTML are easy to master. However, you can greatly relieve
tedium and improve your productivity by using a good tool. A simple tool is Microsoft FrontPage
that reduces the need to remember and type in HTML tags. Still, there can always be situations
where you are forced to handcode certain parts of the web page.
HTML is just a series of tags that are integrated into a document that can have text, images or
multimedia content. HTML tags are usually English words (such as blockquote) or abbreviations
(such as p for paragraph), but they are distinguished from the regular text because they are
placed in small angle brackets. So the paragraph tag is <p>, and the blockquote tag is
<blockquote>. Some tags dictate how the page will be formatted (for instance, <p> begins a new
paragraph), and others dictate how the words appear (<b> makes text bold). Still others provide
information - such as the title - that doesn’t appear on the page itself. The first thing to remember
about tags is that they travel in pairs. Most of the time that you use a tag - say <blockquote> - you
must also close it with another tag - in this case, </blockquote>. Note the slash - / - before the
word “blockquote”; that is what distinguishes a closing tag from an opening tag.
The basic HTML page begins with the tag <html> and ends with </html>. In between, the file
has two sections - the header and the body.
The header - enclosed by the <head> and </head> tags - contains information about a page that
will not appear on the page itself, such as the title. The body - enclosed by <body> and </
body> - is where the action is. Everything that appears on the page is contained within
these tags.
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