HTML Introduction
Mark-up
Early computers did not have graphical displays as we know them today.
When word-processing you did not see what your work looked like until you printed it.
You did not see the fonts. You did not see the formatting.
To make text bold you added some “mark-up” before the text you wanted to format, and added the mark-up to mark the end of the section (seen in the picture as ^B for bold, ^S for underline and ^Y for italic).
These days word-processors are WYSYWYG programs. They show you what the page looks like. We use menus and icons to format text. However in the text file, hidden from us, mark-up is still used.
Hypertext
Back in the 1960’s Ted Nelson had the idea that information should be linked, and that you should be able to click on text and it should take you to a related piece of information. He even suggested that networked computers would be capable of implementing this idea.
Ted Nelson
The World Wide Web
Tim Berners Lee worked at CERN* research laboratories. They produced lots of research information that people at universities all over the world wanted access to. However the current internet methods of sharing files was difficult to use. Tim mixed together Ted Nelson’s idea of hypertext and the use of mark-up to design a code that would create “Hyper-Links” between different text files. These files needed a Browser to fetch and view the files.
Tim Berners Lee created the first web-page, web-server and browser. He invented the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners Lee
HTML
HTML is the language of the web. It is the code that Tim Berners Lee used to write the first web-page.
HTML stands for Hyper-Text Mark-up Language.
HTML uses mark-up called Tags to tell the web-browser how to display the page.
Keywords
Internet
A network of connected computers and other devices all around the world.
World Wide Web
A system of interlinked pages of information that uses the internet.
The standards that govern the World Wide Web are defined by the W3 Consortium.
HTML
Hyper-Text Mark-up Language. The code that every webpage is written in.
Web Browser
A program that displays web-pages on your computer.
It fetches the pages from web-servers on the internet.
It interprets the HTML and decides how to show it on the screen.
Hyper-Text
Text that is linked to other information. When you click on the link, it takes you to the information.
Mark-up
A way of annotating a document to identify particular parts. These normally tell the computer how specific text should look or behave when viewed.