Friday, September 25, 2009

HTML: A Fun Programming Language


What is HTML? Many people who are not familiar or interested in the computer world ask themselves this question. Little do they know, they use HTML in their everyday lives. HTML is the hidden language that is used on the websites that people use every day. The proper name for HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language. Although HTML may often be referred to as a programming language, it is not; it is actually a markup language. A markup language is a set of markup tags which are used to describe web pages.
Markup tags are also called HTML tags. HTML tags are keywords that are surrounded by ankle brackets. An example of this would look like: . HTML tags come in pairs like this: and . In HTML tags there are start tags and end tags, which are also referred to as opening and closing tags. The start tag or opening tag is the first tag in the pair and the end tag or closing tag is the second tag in the pair.
popular web pages, where people use these types of HTML tags, is MySpace.
HTML markups contain elements. Elements are made up of two basic properties: content and attributes. The content and attributes of the element have different restrictions that make a document valid. There are different types of elements used in HTML. These elements are called structural, presentational, and hypertext markups. A structural markup tells the purpose of the text. Presentational markup describes the appearance of the text. Hypertext markup attaches part of one document to part of another document.
Attributes are the name value pairs of an element. They are written within the start tag of an element and are separated by “=”. The attributes of an element are usually in quotes but sometimes they are left unquoted. Although they are sometimes left unquoted, this might be dangerous. Leaving them unquoted may affect the element.

Friday, September 18, 2009