Intro to HTML: Fist Step in Making a Webpage

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What is HTML?

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is the document layout language that formats webpages. HTML documents have extensions .html or .htm.

HTML files can be created in several different ways:

  1. typing out the HTML code in notepad or other simple text application;
  2. Microsoft Word or other word processing application (but the files must be saved as a TEXT file);
  3. using web conversion tools in Word or other applications;
  4. web authoring applications, such as Netscape Composer, Macromedia Dreamweaver, or Adobe Pagemill.

The most pronounced feature of HTML are the tags which are used to identify all objects, formats, and layout of a web page. Tags always appear in a pair of brackets <>. Most tags are followed by matching ending tags, which have a slash symbol </ >. Tags are case-insensitive.

Basic form of an HTML document

An HTML document typically looks like this:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>This is the title of the site</TITLE>
<AUTHOR>the name of the author</AUTHOR>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
This is where the main page content goes.
</BODY>
</HTML>

 the <HTML> tag starts the page.
this tag indicates the header.
the title appears at the top of the browser window.

this tag closes the header.

main body of page begins here.

main body of page ends here.
</HTML> tag ends the document.

Exercise 1

  1. Using Notepad, make an HTML file that contains a header and a body.
  2. Set the title of the page to "YourName's Homepage," and leave the BODY blank for now.
  3. Save the file as "index.html."

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© June 2001 | Thermal Analysis of Materials Processing Laboratory
Tufts University Medford, MA 02155 | Contact: Haruna Tada