HTML

HTML => HyperText Markup Language
XHTML => eXtensible HyperText Markup Language

Definition from Wikipedia -- Hypertext Mark-up Language, or HTML, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to describe a structured document by denoting structural semantics to text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc. and also some other semantics by denoting text as links, quotes, and other things. It also allows embedded images and objects and interactive forms. It is written in the form of "tags" consisting of elements surrounded by angle brackets, and can embed or load scripting languages such as JavaScript, that can affect the behavior of HTML processors like Web browsers, and Cascading Style Sheets to define the appearance of text.

Just in case that doesn't make any sense, I'll try to explain it further. HTML is a language that tells your browser how to present the information it has received from server. The content sent is all text unless the HTML tags tell the browser to do something different with it. HTML Tags are essentially start and stop commands for interpreting the information they enclose.

To see what the HTML looks like for any web page, right click in the browser window and choose View Page Source (Firfox), View Source (Safari and IE), a window will open with the HTML shown as text instead of being interpreted by the browser.

The following examples demonstrate a few of the capabilites of HTML.

<strong>This is an example of a block of text.</strong>

This is an example of a block of text. that was enclosed in a pair of strong tags. The strong tag tells the browser to use the bold version of whatever font it would have otherwise used.

<a href="http://www.web-untangler.com">This is an example of a block of text.</a>

This is an example of a block of text. that was enclosed with and anchor tag. The anchor tag tells the browser this combination as display text and a link.

<a href="splash.html"><img src="logo90h105w.png" alt="Web Untanglers logo" width="105" height="90" class="linknoline" /></a>

This is another anchor tag that tells the browser to display the logo in the upper left corner of this page. It specifies a link to go to if it clicked on, the location of the picture file (on the server), the alternate text for web readers, the dimensions to use when displaying it, and assigns a class that tells it to remove the border usually shown by the browser on pictures that have hyperlinks associated with them.

<link href="webuntangler.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

This tells the browser where to find the Cascading Style Sheet definitions that are to be used for this page. See the CSS section for the basics of CSS.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var MenuBar2 = new Spry.Widget.MenuBar("MenuBar2", {imgRight:"SpryAssets/SpryMenuBarRightHover.gif"});
//-->
</script>

This tells the browser to interpret everything between the pair of script tags as a Javascript program. See the Javascript subsection within this section for the basics.

 

HTML Keys