Friday, September 24, 2010

HTML: A fun programming lanugage

HTML is short for the term Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a type of language that is mostly used for files that are to be posted on the Internet and viewed by other web browsers. They can also be sent using e-mail. It creates everything that we see and use on the Internet.  Hyper is the opposite of linear. It allows people to go anywhere they want whenever they want to go there, instead of having to go in an order. It allows you to move around the web by clicking on things that we call Hyperlinks. They bring you to different pages.  Text is the letters that you use.  Markup is what you are going to do. It is what the HTML tags do to the text inside them. They get marked as a certain type of text, like bold or italicized.  Language is the written symbols, which some will say is a code, but in reality is plain English.
                HTML is the code that makes your webpage look the way it does.  It is a series of short tags or codes that tell the browser where to display everything on the page.  These documents must only be text.  Anything else cannot be read or understood. To read HTML you read it left to right and top to bottom.  HTML is not case sensitive and can be updated after the file is created.  Once the tags or codes are finished the document is saved at a HTML file and can now be viewed through a browser on the Internet, like Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.  The browser reads the file, as the maker wants it to look and is displayed as a webpage instead of many lines of type.
                To format a simple text file, someone would create tags that start and end with angle brackets. To end the formatting or change to another format one would have to type an angled bracket, a backslash, then repeat the command and close the bracket.  There are many different codes for everything from italics, tables, paragraphs and much more.
                A man known as the father of the web invented HTML. He was not a computer programmer; he was a physicist who was working at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Switzerland. His name was Tim Berners-Lee.  He waned to create something that would let researchers use the Internet to collaborate and share their information.  He wanted to be able to let people link all there data together and make research worldwide.
                HTML documents are entirely composed of HTML elements. They usually have three components that include a pair of tags (a start and an end), some element that attributes given to the element within the tags and the actual textual and graphical element. 
                HMLT can take a few days or more to finish, depending on how detailed and specific you want to make your page.  You first need to learn how to do the codes that you want your page to display. To get a good website design it takes the knowledge, skill and talent.  While making your codes you can either store it on the Internet or you can store it all on your computer and transfer it over to the Internet when you are finished.  If you want to add something you can just add it to the existing file online and it will change.  HTML is also modified every few years so improvements can be made and advancements can happen.
                Cacading Stylesheets are used to control how pages are presented and make pages more accessible. The basic special effects and the interaction on the webpage is provided by the system known as Javascript. It adds a lot of power to basic HTML pages.  To put graphics on your webpage can be a little confusing and difficult, so you need to learn all the coes and tags first. The tag for images is <IMG SRC="graphicfilename.gif">.  When you use a picture you need to have it saved in the same folder as your HTML file is saved. Like if the HTML file is saved under a folder called Webpage that is where your photos should be stored.  If you do not do that your page will not show the pictures or graphics.