What is html?
this is probably one of the most frequently asked question’s that are asked.
The internet was originally used by the military during the cold war period, to enable communications between all sectors, (the idea was that after a nuclear strike they can all keep in contact from their nice and safe bunkers). It then progressed to the large universities enabling the sharing of information related to the science world. This meant that the scientists could work together on projects and not have to be in the same place. This was not the internet we all know and love but a very crude version.
At this time it was not possible to even consider the World Wide Web as we have to day. The major flaw in the early networked computers was how they talked to each other. There was not one set procedure and deferent types of computer language were used to communicate. What this meant was that the computers that are talking to each other had to have the same program loaded on it in order to decipher the incoming message. One of the real down sides was that you had to know computer talk as well, in other words you could not just type in what you want to say like you can to day.
That was until a man from London came up with the idea of developing a system where a plain text file can be displayed
on all computers. That man was Tim Berners-Lee. In doing so opened up the World Wide Web. He went on to form the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), this comprises of a group of companies who together create the standards for html. At the start they decided that there will be no royalties for their new technologies, this allows anyone to use them and keeps the internet free.In its early days it only comprised of a few tags and was relatively easy to learn. It as now evolved into a much larger monster and helped to give us the dynamic look and feel we now have.
There as been a few versions of Html over the years, with technology ever advancing so does the internet. The present standard is Xhtml, this is a hybrid of Xml & Html. Ok so that’s enough of me rambling on lets have a look at some html.
We are going to write a very basic html file.
All you need is a simple text editor (I would not use word), Notepad on Windows will do. Then type in the following text.
To see what your page should look like Click Me
Now save the file as hello.htm, when saving select save type as all files. All you need to do now is go to where you saved the file and click on it to open it.
I know it does not look great but you have just produced your first html file. We will style it a little in the Css article. If you wish to learn more look out for my coming E-book on simple website design.
