HTML

Section 1: Overview

HTML (hypertext markup language) is the most predominant markup language for pages on the World Wide Web.

• It is the language that a browser uses to interpret and display documents.
• It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document – by denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists, etc. – and to supplement that text with forms, images, and other objects.

The original version of HTML was developed by a physicist named Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980s.

• As the Web has grown in popularity and undergone several changes, so too has HTML.

The components work together like this:

• Page structure is specified in HTML.
• CSS is used to control presentation.
• XML files can be used to provide the content for web pages.
• JavaScript can be used to read the data from the XML file and build the resulting page.
• The Document Object Model (DOM) underlies all of the above and dictates how to access and control individual elements that make up an HTML document.

This course focuses on how to build a static web page using HTML5, and how to control its appearance using CSS.

• This link presents an analogy that may make more sense.
• The course that follows this will teach you how to use JavaScript to generate interactive web sites, and how to make use of the DOM and XML.
• Later courses will investigate alternatives to JavaScript and XML, as full scale eCommerce sites are developed. (Cool news story)