Lesson One

• What The Heck Is HTML?
  
• Let's Start At The Beginning
  
• What's Really Going on?
  
• Cue The Browser
  
  

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What The Heck Is HTML?
HTML stands for the HyperText Markup Language. HTML code is the major language of the Internet's World Wide Web. Web sites and web pages are written in HTML code. With HTML code and the world wide web, you have the ability to bring together text, pictures, sounds, and links... all in one place! HTML code files are plain text files, so they can be composed and edited on any type of computer... Windows, Mac, UNIX, whatever.

HTML is the language of web pages. In order to truly understand HTML, you need to know a little about browsers, and in order to understand browsers, you really need to know a little about how the web works.

Let's Start At The Beginning

The World Wide Web is a huge collection of computers which are linked together in a network. When I say that they're linked together, I don't necessarily mean physically. What I mean is that they can communicate with each other. They do this by sending data to each other. Data is INFORMATION. That's all it is. Don't let the technical words scare you off. I won't be using too many.

Data, or information, is stored on every computer on the Internet, and takes many forms. Spreadsheets are a form of data, as are Word documents, images, sound bites, and web pages.

Now, you may have noticed that on your computer, when you want to open a document, you sometimes need to use a specific program to do that. If you want to look at a JPEG image, you open it in Photoshop. If you want to view a file that ends in .DOC, you'll use Microsoft Word. The reason for that is that inside of a file, things are written very strangely. Files are usually encoded, and depending on the type of file, they use different codes. The application you open a file with, needs to understand the code it was written with. If I want to communicate with a German, I find someone who can speak German to translate for me. If I asked someone who knew Italian, but had no knowledge of German, I would be out of luck. The German would speak and the Italian translator would just shrug.

Web pages are encoded in their own special way too. The encoding process isn't difficult, and is usually done by hand. The way pages are encoded is with a MARK-UP language we call HTML. Remember that web pages are usually used as a means of conveying data, or information. The data is your message. This is the meat of the HTML document. Text and content are most important.

Once you have created a web page, you store it on a certain type of computer called a web server. Web servers are computers which are attached to the Internet, and do basically two things. A web server stores information documents and sends those documents to any other computer which requests them.

What's Really Going on?
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.

"Hey, send me such and such page"
"okay, Here ya go!" Cue The Browser
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:

<img src="http://DIS.DOZIER.COM/logo.gif">

But what you see is the browsers interpretation of that data. You see, HTML is simply a way for you to tell your visitor's browser how you want it to display your data. Writing HTML is probably a little easier than you might think, and in the next lesson, you'll get a chance to make your own web page!

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