The Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

The most important thing you need to know about Web publishing, is that all Web browsers interpret and display Web pages on your computer by means of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). It's the language that every Web browser understands.

HTML is a subset of Standard General Markup Language (SGML), a globally-accepted way of describing the parts of a document, such as Title, Body, Heading, Subheading, etc., generically using tags. (A subset means that HTML conforms to SGML conventions.)

When you request a Web page, complete with linked hypertext, graphics and whatever, what you actually get is a plain text file containing HTML instructions, which are tagged like this:

<B>Bold text</B>

When your Web browser reads that tag, it displays the text between the and tags as Bold Text. If you wrote:

Do you <B>understand</B> or are you very <B>confused</B>by now?

in an HTML file, your Web browser would display on your computer screen:

There's quite a bit more to it than this, but it isn't hard to begin to write simple HTML files, and publish them on a Web server. You'll soon learn about tags and other concepts of HTML.

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