HTML is the language of the internet. It tells your browser what to show a visitor and where to show it. You can build a perfectly presentable site without knowing a line of HTML, the Site Building software that comes free with your internet hosting package, or you download as free open source software (a Google search for Free Site Builder Software comes up with more than 24 million hits), or even buy will build you a fine looking site but a look at the source coding will show you just how 'clunky' the coding can be.
Note if you are using Internet Explorer you can see your source code - or anyone else's come to that - by calling up a site then pressing f12. A strip will open at the bottom of the page. Click on view (on the bottom menu) and then on 'Source'
On any site the actual text and images that you see form only a tiny part of the whole source coding. The rest are instructions created by the programmes you use to generate your site. Yours are the black bits!
Most of the multi-coloured material you see there is concerned with the conventions of the browser community and cannot be removed without damaging the site, but some at least of the clunkier code can be dispensed with.
I set up a test paragraph:
Look at my test paragraph.
My site builder renders it with - ignoring the brackets which can't be rendered on this site with:
One pair of 'class' tagsTwo pairs of 'span' tagsThree pairs 'style' tagsOne pair of p tagsIn amongst all this is my text 'Look at my test paragraph.'
Whereas all it really all it needs is one pair of 'p' tags.
The site builder's version works, but the message is lost in the HTML, and may or may not be found by the search engines.
Anyway leaving the 'clunky' argument aside, HTML is easily learned though there is rather a lot of it. Most of the site builders enable you to do it as an option. The newcomer can make do with just a very few tags - the HTML instructions marked out by being in angle brackets. HTML tags come in pairs a start tag and an end tag. The end tag is the same as the start tag but with the addition of a '/'.
So a 'p' in angle brackets means start a paragraph and '/p' also in angle brackets means end a paragraph as shown above.
Other basic tags are:
P and /p for paragraphsh1 and /h1 and for a major headingh2 and /h2 for a secondary heading and h3, h4 and h5 for lesser headings.strong and /strong for bold text.There's much more than this of course - but maybe next time.
Roger Webb is a retired CEO from Small and Medium Sized (SME) companies in the UK and Continental Europe. In thirty years experience at life at the top he has been instrumental in turning around and setting up a number of specialist subsidiaries in Europe, Africa and beyond, in every case producing stable profits in some of the most testing corporate environments imaginable.
In retirement he has devoted most of his energies in developing a group of wiki sites devoted to helping others to set up eBusinesses. His current sites http://computer-virgin.net/ for new-starters and http://mywebtrade.net/ for those further along the trail are just part of those efforts.