HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
in a variety of ways, as described later in this chapter. Many different Web page elements,
including text, graphics, and animations, can serve as hyperlinks. Figure 1-7 shows examples
of several different Web page elements used as hyperlinks.
URL in
Address bar
menu bar
of links
list of
text links
graphic
links
Figure 1-7 A Web page can use several different Web page elements as hyperlinks.
What Is Hypertext Markup Language?
Web pages are created using
Hypertext Markup Language
(
HTML
), which is an
authoring language used to create documents for the World Wide Web. HTML uses a set
of special instructions called
tags
or
markup
to define the structure and layout of a Web
document and specify how the page is displayed in a browser.
A Web page is a file that contains both text and HTML tags. HTML tags mark the
text to define how it should appear when viewed in a browser. HTML includes hundreds
of tags used to format Web pages and create hyperlinks to other documents or Web pages.
For instance, the HTML tags <p> and </p> are used to indicate a new paragraph with a
blank line above it, <table> and </table> are used to indicate the start and end of a table,
and <hr /> is used to display a horizontal rule across the page. Figure 1-8a shows the
HTML tags needed to create the Web page shown in Figure 1-8b. You can also enhance
HTML tags by using attributes, as shown in Figure 1-8a.
Attributes
define additional
characteristics such as font weight or style for the HTML tag.
HTML is
platform independent
, meaning you can create, or code, an HTML file
on one type of computer and then use a browser on another type of computer to view that
file as a Web page. The page looks the same regardless of what platform you are using.
One of the greatest benefits of Web technology is that the same Web page can be viewed
on many different types of digital hardware, including mobile devices like smartphones.
