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.
Let's Start At The Beginning
The World Wide Web is a huge collection of computers, which are linked together
in a network.
When we say that they're linked together, we don't necessarily mean physically.
What we mean is that they can communicate with each other. They do this by
sending data to each other.
Data is INFORMATION.
That's all it is. Don't let the technical words scare you off. I won't be using too many. Data, or information, is stored on every computer on the Internet, and takes many forms. Spreadsheets are a form of data, as are Word documents, images, sound bites, and web pages. Now, you may have noticed that on your computer, when you want to open a document, you sometimes need to use a specific program to do that.
If you want to look at a JPEG image, you open it in PhotoShop or another graphics viewer program. If you want to view a file that ends in .DOC, you'll use Microsoft Word. The reason for that is that inside of a file, things are written very strangely. Files are usually encoded, and depending on the type of file, they use different codes. The application you open a file with, needs to understand the code it was written with.
Web pages are encoded in their own special way too. The 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. Remember that web pages are usually used as a means of conveying data, or information. The data is your message. This is the meat of the HTML document. Text and content are most important.
Once you have created a web page, you store it on a certain type of computer called a web server. Web servers are computers, which are attached to the Internet, and do basically two things. A web server stores information documents and sends those documents to any other computer, which requests them.