Understanding HTML

HTML, The Fundamentals

So you want to learn HTML? Great, so do I. Let's start by learning the basics.

The first thing you should know is that a web page is made up of several different things. However, to start with we are going to focus on the Hyper-Text Markup Language, or HTML. The HTML is written in a text editor (I am using Notepad++ which you can download here). Once you type up some HTML then you can place it on a web server for anyone to access.

Web Server

Wait? What's a web server? It's basically the internet's version of a closet or storage unit. Except it is probably better organized. A web server will hold documents and in our case, the HTML documents we would want other people to see.

The server just sits there storing these files away until someone requests them using their web browser.

Web Browser

Oh man, another term. Except I think I know this one. A web browser is what we use to access web pages correct?

That is correct. A web browser searches for specific web pages on a web server. Once the browser finds the web page on the web server it then displays the content to the user.

But how does the web browser know what to display and how to display it?

Well, that's easy. HTML is how.

HTML

In HTML you will put tags around the content of the document so that a web browser knows how to display the content. There are opening and closing tags. An opening and closing tag make an element. An example of an element would be the paragraph element: <p>, this is known as an opening tag. While this is the closing tag: </p>. Your content would go in-between the opening and closing tags.

I am not going to include all the tags as there are just too many of them. If you want to do more research on HTML then visit w3 Schools.

Just as a side note, I will be writing all of my blogs using HTML that I know. Eventually as I begin to learn CSS, I will start to incorporate that into my blogs.

For this blog, I used the paragraph element (<p> </p>) as well as the h1 element (<h1> <h1>) and the h2 element (<h2> <h2>). To include the links I used: <a href="website.com">Clickable Text Goes Here</a>. I did use a few <br> tags to create extra line spaces. I added an iframe element for the video at the bottom (<iframe></iframe>).

You now have all the information that I used to make this blog post. So get out there and start making your own website. Don't get wrapped up in the fact that you don't know everything yet. It's okay that it looks bland, it is about progress, not becoming an overnight sensation.

For the longest time, I was paralyzed by the feeling that I didn't know everything. Then I watched the video below and decided it was enough just thinking and I needed to be doing:

So there you have it. Some of the fundamental knowledge I have learned in a few weeks of HTML learning.

Here is a snapshot of the some of the HTML that I used to let you see how it looks in action.