WEBPAGES, WEBPAGES, WEBPAGES
Many people turn on their computer, click on their browser and "WHOALA," a webpage appears on their screen. Have you ever wondered how webpages are made? How do you make a picture the size that it is, or have a word be one color and the rest of the words another color?What about font size? How is that done?
First, let's talk about the language you need to learn to create a webpage.
Enter: HTML
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is the standard markup language for creating webpages, it describes the structure of a webpage, and the HTML elements tells the browser how to display its content.
What is a markup language? A markup language is a human readable computer language that uses tags to define elements within a document.
What is an HTML element? An HTML element usually consists of a start tag and an end tag with the content inserted in between.
Here is an example of an HTML element:
In order to make a website, HTML code needs to be written in a text editor. See the picture below for an example of an html file that has been written in Sublime Text Editor.
The first line calls out what kind of language the document is written in. As you can see, it is in the HTML language.
On line 2, you see the <html> root element.
HTML is like XML in that it is structured in a tree form. There are branches and leaves as well as parents, children, siblings, etc.
EXAMPLE:
- In the photo above, locate the <body> tag.
- Under that, there is an <h1> tag. That <h1> tag is a child of the <body> tag.
- Directly under the <h1> tag, there is a <p> tag. That <p> tag is also a child of the <body> tag AS WELL AS a sibling to the <h1> tag.
- The text that follows the <h1> tag, "HELLO WORLD!" - that is a child of the <h1> tag. The sentence below the <p> tag is a child to the <p> tag.
Take a look at the picture below:
Photo Credit and a detail description of this photo can be found here. |
Do you see how parent, child, sibling works in HTML? Can you also see how it can look like a tree structure? The trunk of the tree is <html>, where the branches meet the trunk is the <body> and all of the different branches and leaves are the different element tags and their children that are found within the body.
Stay tuned for the next post where we get into some of the basic element tags used in HTML.
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