What is HTML?

Now that we have laid down some guidelines, let's get down to the nitty gritty of our subject. Strictly speaking, HTML is not a programming language. It is more of a presentation language. So you will use it to make your pages more attractive by integrating images, links, etc., and improving text formatting through the definition of fonts and other attributes, such as bold, italic, underlined, among others.

HTML is made of tags which are syntax tokens bound to a layout style or an object. They are easy to spot as they are always enclosed between the < and > characters. For instance, the tag to use to apply an italic style to a text is <i> and the one to insert an image is <img>.


HTML use two tag types:

• Formatting tags
  
  
These tags are used as a pair: an opening tag such as <i>, and a closing tag, denoted by the slash character /, such as </i>. For instance, a text in italic will be marked up as follows: <i>italic</i>.


• Insertion tags
  
  
They allow you to incorporate various kinds of objects into your page, such as images, sounds, videos, etc. They are used as singletons, without a closing tag, but are assigned attributes that complement them.

For instance, to incorporate an image from a file named avion.jpg, you would use the <img> tag combined to the src attribute. You would obtain the following: <img src="avion.jpg"> for this result:

You are now aware of the HTML syntax. There is still a last issue to talk about before writing a first page. Which software should you use for creating Web pages? For your first trial, try a simple text editor: under Windows, Notepad , or on Macintosh systems, SimpleText . But don't forget to save your pages with the extension .html.