Macmillan Computer Publishing
What Is HTML?
You can't build a monument without bricks, and you can't make bricks without straw--everyone who has seen the film The Ten Commandments knows that. Likewise, if you plan to establish your own monumental presence on the World Wide Web, you have to start with the straw--HTML.
You can't build a monument without bricks, and you can't make bricks without straw--everyone who has seen the film The Ten Commandments knows that. Likewise, if you plan to establish your own monumental presence on the World Wide Web, you have to start with the straw--HTML.
The World Wide Web is built of Web pages, and those pages are themselves created with HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. Though many folks talk about HTML Programming with a capital P (particularly recruiters), HTML is really not a programming language at all. HTML is exactly what it claims to be: a markup language. You use HTML to mark up a text document, just as you would if you were an editor using a red pencil. The marks you use indicate which format (or style) should be used when displaying the marked text.
If you have ever used an old word processing program (remember WordStar?), you already know how a markup language works. In these old programs, if you wanted text to appear italicized, you surrounded it with control characters. For example, you might surround a phrase with control characters that make it appear as bold text: