The first step in creating a webpage using HTML is to understand a few basic terms. Don’t worry if you don’t fully comprehend the meaning of these terms. As we go along, it will make much more sense!
HTML – HyperText Markup Language – this is the language used to create webpages. This is what you will be learning in this tutorial. To truly appreciate this term, let’s look at the individual parts of this term.
HyperText – Any digital text that links to other text or webpages. Think hyperlink!
Markup Language – A computer language that formats text.
Tags – The codes that HTML uses. They will be surrounded by < and >. Example: The <b> tag makes any word following it bold.
Closing Tag – A tag that ends the command of a previous tag. A closing tag has a forward slash /. Example: The </b> tag ends bold. This is <b>bold</b>, this is not.
Web Browser – Sometimes known simply as a browser. A web browser is a program used to view webpages. Examples include Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome.
Text Editor – A program used to edit simple text files. It is like a word processing program without all the bells and whistles. Most computers come with text editors. Look for the following program on your computer:
- Windows Computer – Notepad
- MAC Computer – TextEdit Click here to format TextEdit for HTML
- Chromebook – Caret, Text (Both are available on the Google Web Store and will work with any computer using Google Chrome.)
What do we do with all these terms?
In the next steps of this tutorial we will type html tags in a text editor to create a webpage that can be viewed in a browser.