Learn HTML

Web browsers, such as Netscape Navigator^TM and Microsoft^TM Internet Explorer, read files that are formatted using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML sounds more complicated than it is. In essence, it consists of tags that are inserted into your text. These tags tell the browser whether a particular section of text is a heading or a paragraph, whether it should use a bold or italic font, whether it should be underlined, whether it is a link to another Web document, and so on. The tags are surprisingly easy to learn: each tag turns on a particular effect and a corresponding tag turns that effect off. Tags that turn on an effect are placed within angle brackets < > and those that turn off an effect are placed within an angle bracket with a forward slash: </ >.

You can create HTML documents using a variety of software programs. You can use a plain-text editor, such as Notepad, to code your documents by hand. You can use an HTML editor, such as Allaire's HomeSite, to create documents of virtually any complexity.

Note: If you want to create Web pages without learning HTML, you can use the built-in HTML conversion tools in your word processor. The only drawback to relying on the built-in HTML conversion programs in word processors is that it can be difficult to revise the code in the files if anything goes wrong with them. To avoid this problem, it's usually best to preserve your original word processing files. If you need to change the pages on your Web site, make changes to the word processing file, convert the revised file to HTML, and then replace the old file with the new file.

Before you begin creating your pages, you must learn how to use HTML. You will find an introduction to HTML in the coding primer, The HTML Tagging Language.

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