HTML Concepts

Goals

Spend about 45 minutes

Understanding basic HTML concepts
Looking at HTML from pages you browse

What is HTML?

Hypertext Markup Language - structured text
Tell browser what content you have, not how to present it

Example
<html> <title>My First Web Page!</title> <P> This is a paragraph of text. Let's put a horizontal line below this. <hr> <P> Do you like this image <img src="arabianbt.gif">? Bye for now. </html>

Aside from title (and bolding), this is what it looks like:
This is a paragraph of text. Let's put a horizontal line below this.

Do you like this image ? Bye for now.

Tags, matching tags, tag attributes; white space irrelevant
Jargon: DTD of SGML, XML

Let's Look at Some HTML

Browse to any page - perhaps my home page
File...Save As (or Control-S) and specify a name like temp.htm on the desktop (or a temporary folder or your a: disk)
Drag that file into a text editor like Notepad or my favorite Win95 editor, Programmer's File Editor to inspect the HTML
After you've got the basics, it is probably the best way to learn HTML by modelling after examples
There are great HTML references available on the web, including the HTML 4.0 specification and lots of tutorials (check out this interactive one)

Where does the HTML "live"?

On a server (host) computer
A program (httpd) runs all the time and watches for HTML requests
As they come in, it serves the HTML and sends it to your machine, where your browser visualizes it
How to get the HTML and multimedia files from your PC to the server?
- Typically, ftp it
  - Jargon: TCP/IP's way to move files between connected machines - file transfer protocol
  - Can specify as URI of form ftp://computername/directory
  - Most authoring tools have built-in ftp
  - You can always get an ftp application from the great site of reviewed software at Stroud's
- "Sneaker net" it to the machine
- email it to a receptive system administrator
- Do nothing if your local machine is also the server!

HTML Concepts

Goals

What is HTML?

Let's Look at Some HTML

Where does the HTML "live"?

Created September 17, 1998

HTML by Dilip Barman, background courtesy of