What is HTML? A quick and easy explanation with a chance to write your own HTML

What is HTML?
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.com) defines HTML as the publishing language of the World Wide Web. It's initials stand for Hypertext Markup Language(HTML).

In plain English HTML can do nifty things with TEXT. You can change text into useful stuff by writing instructions with tags. A little program in your browser can read this international (universal) language and make the changes.

Examples are:

Links - So you jump from page to page all over all off the computers connected together in the world at the time. Does this sound like the World Wide Web? Yep, these hyperlinks connect us to our own pages and to remote pages on other sites. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee who proposed this nifty idea in 1980.
Lists - You can itemise your products if you ask HTML to do so. How do you do that, you may ask? You write <ol> which let HTML tell the little coding machine in your browser that you now want an ordered list. Then before item 1 you write <li>, and the same thing before item 2 and before as many items that you need. Then you must tell HTML to stop making lists, which you do so by writing </ol>
The example of HTML will look like this:
<ol>
<li>My first item in the 'what is html' list
<li>Second item of 'what is html' list
<li>Third item in the 'what is html' list and so forth
</ol>
This is a ordered list you are reading right now.You cannot see the HTML behind this page, but it is there if you right click on the page and click 'view source'. You will have to scroll down to see this part of the page.
Paragraphs - <p>This tells HTML it is the start of a new paragraph, and to stop the paragraph we write </p>
This is a new paragraph you are reading now by me using the paragraph tags in the HTML of this page.

Web Editors (or HTML Editors) let you write normally and let you format it with the format tools they give you. This editor then converts your writing into HTML so that browsers can read it.

With the use of these tags you can also pull some fancy objects into your page. Like pictures, or a Flash movie, or a form where your clients can send you information or order stuff from you, or a shopping cart, or JavaScript and other gadgets. Javascript is a script that you embed (pull in) into your page and it make interactive games appear. It can do alot more and should not be confused with the Java programming language. JavaScript works in your browser, Java runs on your PC by itself and interact with your operating system (Windows most likely).

But wait, there is more! Modern HTML link to style sheets (known as Cascade Style Sheets or CSS to tell it what font to use, what colours, what sizes, where things should go on the page and other instructions to make the page look smicko.
Old HTML used tags to give the browsers these instructions. Microsoft and Netscape developed their own tags in the early days, so that a page which looks good in Internet Explorer may look horrible in Netscape. The W3C (remember them?) are standardising the web with CSS and standard tags. If your page complies with their requirements it is said to be an XHTML page or in HTML5 (the latest) format.

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