HTML Tutorial #1 - Introduction

This is the first of what will hopefully be a number of HTML tutorials (see the number in parentheses to keep track of where you are in this HTML tutorial series. By the end of the tutorials, you should be able to make a website entirely in HTML. There are many HTML reference sites on the Internet you can use to see what is all available to you when making a website using HTML. The goal of these HTML tutorials will be to build on what you learn from the previous tutorials. Eventually, we will be making an entire website entirely in HTML. So let us begin!

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is what is understood by Internet Explorer, Netscape, Fire fox, or whatever web browser you are using. It is the "language" you need to learn if you want to be able to make a basic website. An HTML-based website consists of a bunch of individual web pages that link to each other in one way or another. Each of these web pages consists of a bunch of HTML tags that define what the page is going to look like.

There are a lot of HTML tags at your disposal. Through the course of these tutorials, we will be using many of them to eventually create our website. HTML tags are things enclosed in ' < > ' brackets. The core tag in all HTML pages is:

< html >

That is called an HTML tag. (note there should be no space between the ' < ' and the word "html". It should be all one word with the ' < ' right before the ' h ' and the ' > ' right after the ' l ' without a space. If you are going to copy paste the code, keep this in mind) The "html" inside the ' < > ' is the HTML tag. HTML is case-insensitive. That means it does not matter whether you use upper-case or lower-case letters. The "html" could be "hTMl" or "HtmL", or any combination, as long as the letters "html" are there in that order. The ' < > ' need to be there in those places. Everything inside those pointy brackets is the name of the tag.

Usually, for each tag name (example: "html"), there is an opening tag and a closing tag. The opening tag is where that tag takes effect, and the closing tag is where that tag stops taking effect. The opening tag for "html" is simply:

< html >

and the closing tag is:

< /html >

Notice the only difference between the opening and closing tag is the ' / ' before the "html". This is true for all opening and closing tags. Our first web page will use just the < html > tag. When I say < html > tag I mean the opening < html > and the closing < /html > tag also. So the code in the most basic blank html page will look something like this:

< html >
< /html >

This shows the opening < html > tag and the closing < /html > tag. Everything between the opening and closing tag will be what is on the webpage. So let us type something on our webpage by putting something between the opening and closing tags.

< html >
This is my webpage.
< /html >

This will type the sentence "This is my webpage." onto the webpage. Notice that all of that could have been written on one line, but generally when writing HTML it is good to make it easy to read the code by writing everything in a way so that it is nicely organized (our sentence is in a line of its own).

That is all there is to it. We have in the above three lines of code, what we will need to make our first webpage.

We will make the first webpage in the next tutorial.