What is HTML? HTML stands for hypertext markup language. What does that mean? Hyper is a Greek word that can mean things like super or beyond. So, hypertext is beyond text or super text, or, to put it in more modern vernacular, hypertext is text on steroids.
Hypertext allows you to easily incorporate text, images, tables, and formatting in one document and then easily link to other hypertext documents or resources. The ability to easily link to other information, however, is seen as the main benefit, the main “super quality,” if you will. With printed text, like books or magazines, if the text references some other article or book, the reader would have to somehow find that other article or book (like go to the library or book store) to have access to the other source of information. In some case, such as with rare or old documents, one may never actually be able to view the referenced source of information. But, with hypertext, you can just click on a link, and—boom!—you’re at the other source of information.
Markup language refers to the fact that HTML uses special tags to mark up the regular text of the document. The special tags tell the web browsers how to format or display the text. The term “markup” refers to the way human editors used to markup manuscripts or other documents to indicate where changes or corrections needed to be made. The editors would often use a different color ink (like red) so that their comments could easily stand out. And the editors’ comments gave instructions about what to do with the document. Similarly, HTML marks up the text of the document and gives instructions to the web browser.
HTML is just a part of something called the World Wide Web which, believe it or not, was invented by one man named Tim Berners-Lee. Now, the World Wide Web is not the Internet. It feels like the Internet, but it’s not. The World Wide Web just uses the Internet. The World Wide Web is a way of transferring information across the Internet.
Besides HTML, the other important parts of the World Wide Web are URLs (uniform resource locators) and HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). We will need to know more about URLs, but we will cover that later. HTTP concerns how HTML documents are transmitted across the Internet. HTTP is complicated, but fortunately we don’t really need to know anything about it to make a simple website. You can actually make quite nice websites without knowing anything at all about HTTP. However, you should at least know what it stands for…just so you can sound intelligent when to talking to other web designers.
What is HTML? HTML is the language used to make webpages. If you want to learn how to make webpages, you’ll have to learn HTML.
Are you ready for the next lesson: Introduction to HTML Tags?
