The Basics

What Exactly is HTML?

HTML is the language of web pages. In order to truly understand HTML, you need to know a little about browsers, and in order to understand browsers, you really need to know a little about how the web works.

The World Wide Web is a huge collection of computers that are linked together in a network. When we say that they are linked together, we do not necessarily mean physically. What we mean is that they can communicate with each other by sending data back and forth.

Data (or information) takes many forms and is stored on every computer on the Internet. Spreadsheets are a form of data, as are Word documents, images, sound bites, and web pages.

You may have noticed that when you want to open a document on your computer, you need to use a specific program to do so. If you want to view a .jpg file, you open it in a drawing application. If you want to view a file that ends in .doc, you will use Microsoft Word.

Files are usually encoded and depending on the type of file, codes are specific to a each application. The application you open a file with needs to understand the code. (To illustrate, if I want to communicate with a German-speaking person and do not know the German language, I need to find someone who can speak German to translate for me. If I ask someone who knows Italian, but had no knowledge of German, I would not be able to communicate with my German friend. The German would speak and the Italian translator would not understand.)

The web page encoding process isn't difficult, and is usually done by hand. The way pages are encoded is with a MARK-UP language we call HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Remember that web pages are used as a means of conveying data, or information - the data is your message. In this sense, text and content are important.

Once you have created a web page, you store it on a particular type of computer called a web server. Web servers are computers which are attached to the Internet, and do basically two things: store information documents and send those documents to any other computer that requests them

Here's what really happens when you surf the web:
You attach to the Internet with a special type of computer program known as a browser. The first thing the browser wants to know is where you want to go. You type in an URL. (A URL is an address. This address tells the browser exactly where to find the page you want.)

Next, your browser writes a quick message to the computer at that address requesting the page. In less than a second, the request is answered and your page delivered. The computer (or web server) that has received the request grabs the data for the requested page, and transmits it back to the requesting computer.

The Browser
The browser takes all of the raw (encrypted) data, translates it, and then displays it on your screen. What the browser sees is something like this:

HTML is simply a way for you to tell your visitor's browser how you want it to display your data.