Rewind - HTML

Every so often it pays to rewind and go back to basics! Not only does this help people new to a subject, frequently it assists those more accomplished who have either forgotten, were self-taught or who have found more complicated ways of doing things.

From this premise, let’s take a look at HTML. Hypertext Mark up Language, to give it its full title, is the code that forms a web page.  It’s this code which is used to render the page on your monitor screen the way the web designer, hopefully, intended.

To see an example of this code, right click on this page and select View Source.

Pretty unintelligible, huh?

At first look, certainly. But the digital world of computing as we know is made up of zeroes and ones, a binary code that tells a bunch of transistors when to switch on and off.

HTML is much the same: switch this effect on here, switch this effect off here…A set of road signs or traffic lights, if you will.

Here’s an example:  Computer

To render this word in bold on a web page, the HTML tag required consists of three elements – an opening bracket, the text to be affected, and the closing bracket, thus:

<b>Computer</b>

<b> signifies start Bold, and </b> signifies stop Bold here.

Suddenly, the hieroglyphics of the source code is starting to make some sense.

Sticking with text for now, the tags below do the following jobs:

<p> </p>= paragraph

<i> </i>= italics

<u> </u> = underline

<br> </br> = break

<strong>  </strong> = strong

<center>  </center> = centre

While this is useful background info, you will see a lot of web pages that are governed by style sheets or rendering using JavaScript – the former doing away with the need for most text coding, and the latter adding greater functionality.

Back in the real world for web masters or web site owners whose day job is running their business, the above may shed some light on what is going on under their cyberspace bonnet.