How HTML Works

HTML Introduction (How HTML Works)

HTML is not like other programming languages like C and C++ etc. It is a language of web browsers.

HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) is the primary language for formatting web pages.  With HTML you describe what a page should look like, what types of fonts to use, what color text should be, where paragraph marks come and many more aspects of the document.

It is the job of the browser that requests the HTML file to format the page according to the various tags included in the HTML.  Because there are so many different vendors of browsers, and each vendor has their own way of interpreting what a HTML tag should accomplish, a web page will look different in different browsers.

For instance, Lynx (A Popular Unix Based Browser) which only displays text for a web page will not have the capabilities to display many of the graphical features of a web page such as images, forms, tables, etc. - This doesn't mean Lynx is a bad browser, rather it means it was designed to operate a particular way on a particular platform.

All HTML documents are created by using a tag. Tags have beginning and ending identifiers to communicate to the browser the beginning and ending text that is to be formatted by the tag in question. There are some tags that do not have an ending tag for reasons that are obvious when used. This will become apparent as you become more familiar with HTML.

Most of the tags have an opening and a closing tag (you will become more familiar with this concept in this document). Each tag is enclosed with the "less than" (i.e. <) and "greater than" (i.e. >) sign. The closing tag usually looks the exact same as the opening tag with the exception of the "forward slash" (i.e. /) that identifies it is a closing tag.