by Matt Moyne

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the computer language that most of the Internet is written in.

HTML is made up of tags and sets of tags, a set being two tags that are linked: a start tag and an end tag. HTML is a bit like a person, the head comes first, then the body. All tags are surrounded by less than and greater than signs but for the purpose of this article, I'm going to put them in inverted commas.

The very first main tag of every single HTML document is usually the HTML tag, which is a start tag and is written as "html". Accompanying it will be the very last tag of the document, the end tag, "/html". Notice the / this means it is an end tag. Every start tag must have an end tag. Start tags begin a section of code and end tags finish it. I say the very first "main" tag as there can be a tag before it, the DOCTYPE tag. This tag gives the browser information about what type of HTML is being used.

The head section begins with the "head" tag and ends with the "/head" tag. It has information about the page itself and consists of the page title, the meta tags (more on those in a minute), and the code for any page transitions you may have.

The page title is self-explanatory and is written as "title" Your page title "/title"

On to meta tags, particularly for http://www.moynem.freeserve.co.uk (first created when I knew nothing about HTML apart from what it was and what it stood for) The title of this website is "M Moyne's home page" and thus it has the meta tag: "meta name="keywords" content="M Moyne". This is one exception, meta tags have no end tag.

There is also a meta description tag which used to tell the search engines how to describe the website on their results pages, now I've seen them use the first few lines of text on the page for their description.

The next of the main tags is the body tag, which is written as "body" and "/body" respectively. It contains the main part of your HTML code. On my personal homepage it starts off with the code for the background. In this case it is a JPEG image. You can put almost anything in the body section, navigation bars, page banners, tables, images, horizontal lines, hyperlinks and so on. However all of the things that I have just mentioned cannot go anywhere else except the body section.

Let's look at the code for some simple things.

Headings: Heading 1 is "h1" and "/h1" Heading 2 is "h2" and "/h2" Heading 3 is "h3" and "h3" and so on.

Paragraphs begin with "p" and end with "/p"

A 100 * 200 image with a description is: "img src="image1.jpg" width="100" height="200" alt="my image" longdesc="myfirstimage.html" "

That's enough for a simple web page.

M Moyne knows quite a bit about Microsoft Front Page, which he used to create http://www.moynem.freeserve.co.uk and http://www.myorlandoguide.bravehost.com He also knows quite a bit about Macromedia Flash and might someday create a Flash website. He is not a businessman and Web Design is only a hobby for him.

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