Introduction to HTML, Free online HTML Tutorial, Learn HTML online for free...

HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the basis of the whole World Wide Web or WWW. Almost every page on the www contains some of the HTML instructions. Broadly speaking, HTML is a markup language used to create web pages for the display over the internet. It contains markup instructions in the forms of tags enclosed in angle brackets <>, which an internet browser uses to render or display information. The information can be in the form of text, images, animations etc.

A simple HTML web page:

<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head><body>Body Elements Go here</body>
</html>

Please do not worry about the different elements that constitute the above code. I just wanted you to have a look at a simple HTML web page. The complete explanation of the above code will come under discussoin in the later pages / lessons.

Here I want you to notice that each HTML instruction is enclosed in <>, combined they are called tags. Each tag in the above code has a start and an end tag. The end tag contains a / before the HTML instruction and after the < sign. Note that not every HTML tag is paired, some of them are also stand alone, discussed later. The whole HTML tags are enclosed by <html> and </html> tags.

Software Requirements to learn HTML:

You only need a web browser like Internet Explores or FireFox and Notepad, which comes with every Microsoft Windows installation. Mac users may use TextEdit. After typing the HTML code in the text editor of your choice, save the file with an .htm or .html extension. To see the output, just double click the file, the file will be opened in the web browser.

After you have learned the material of this tutorial you will be able to use advanced HTML editors like FrontPage or DreamWeaver.

Next >>> Lesson No. 2: Title and Head Tags