How it works

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 to go. You type in an URL. An URL is an address. This address tells the browser exactly where to find the page you're looking for. What happens next is that your browser writes a quick message to the computer at that address requesting the page you want. In less than a second, the request has been delivered. The computer which has received the request (The Web Server, remember?) grabs the data for the requested page, and shoots it back to the requesting computer. "Send me such and such page" "okay, Here it is!"

So now, you have the data for that web page on your computer, but it's slightly encrypted, remember? The browser takes all that raw data, and translates it. Then displays it on your screen. what the browser sees is raw data, which might look like this:

But what you see is the browsers' interpretation of that data, which looks like this:

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

As we discussed, HTML is a way for you to suggest to other people' computers exactly how to display your webpage. By using HTML, you're able to leave little invisible sets of instructions all over your webpage that explain what your page should look like.

The code

A webpage, in its raw form, is simply a text file ending with the suffix .html or .htm If you display this file on your computer in it's raw form, you'll see nothing but text interspersed with HTML tags. We're talking no background, no pictures of your cat, no really cool animations, nothing but text and code. This text file, in all its rawness, is often referred to as the "source code" of a webpage.

So how does this boring and dry text file become a webpage with colour and life and vitality?

You have a program on your computer that takes these text files, reads them in the raw, and displays them on your computer's monitor in whatever way the file's HTML suggests. This program is called a browser. If you look at the source code for any webpage, you'll notice different HTML commands interspersed all through the document. These commands are called TAGS and tell the browser how to display the text, layout, and images of the document. HTML tags are easy to recognise because they are always between a lesser than sign and greater than sign, or as I like to call them, Angle Brackets.

<Like This>

The first you should learn is the BOLD tag. It's simply the letter "B", sandwiched between two angle brackets and looks like

<b>
Tags almost always work in pairs. There are a few exceptions we'll discuss later, but most of the time there is an opening tag and a closing tag. The closing tag for Bold looks like
</b>

Notice it's the same as the opening Bold tag except for the /mark. All closing tags are like that. They look the same as the opening tag except for the added slash right after the lesser than sign. Any text placed between the opening and closing bold tags will look thicker than the rest of the text on the page.

This is NORMAL text. This is BOLD text

One thing I should probably mention at this point is that html tags don't give a hoot if you type them in lowercase or CAPITAL letters or even a mix of big and small letters. Everything inside the angle brackets gets read the same way.