Yes, we are still talking web design here. And no, that’s not what HTML stands for.

Previously I summarized what was needed to have a website online. In that article I promised to talk about HTML and I try very hard to keep all my promises.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. An HTML document is a text document with commands for a web browser, used in tags, to display a website properly. It simply tells the browser what to display, where, what it should look like, and what page to open next if there was a link clicked.

HTML is plain text. So the website you visit is actually just some plain text, that could have been written in Notepad or some similar program. Do you want to see what an HTML file looks like? Right click right here and select “View page source” or some similar phrase, depending on your browser. A second window will pop up and its contents will be the HTML that produces my blog. So if you would copy that HTML into another text file, give it a name, making sure it ended with .html and placed it on a web server somewhere, you might see this page of my blog.

Does it look scary to you? Well, it isn’t. Once you understand that p creates paragraphs, a creates hyperlinks, strong bolds the text, br creates a line break, img displays an image, etc, you might start to understand the way the site is build up. Go ahead, check the source and try to see if where the <p> tags are, there really are paragraphs.

Imagine what you can do then when you understand a lot more HTML tags.