If you're a seasoned web designer/programmer, this is definitely not for you. But, if you're new to the web and have no idea what HTML is or how web pages function, then this short primer will get you pointed in the right direction.
HTML is simply an acronym that stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is simply a file that contains tags that tell a web server what to spit out. You can create a web page in any text editor. This includes notepad. All you have to do is save it with the .html or .htm extension. Well, you need tags in the document as well, but that goes without saying.
Okay, so you know that html is just an acronym. And you know that html pages are simply text documents with tags in them. Now, let me show you the bare bones html structure you need to use:
Everything in brackets is a tag. You have to have opening and closing tags. We use the open tag first and then close it with the slash symbol in front of the tag name, enclosed with brackets. It's the way the markup language works. You have to start and end your pages with the html tag. That just tells the web server, "Here comes my html page." The header tag contains the title of the page, meta tags (we will explain in a later post), etc. The body tag lets the server know that the main part of the page is coming. This can contain text, pictures, tables, etc. We will have to cover that at a later point. But that's really the bare bones for you. We'll also cover some free tools soon.
html page
html tag hyper text markup hyper text markup language page meta tags web pages 
January 7th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Just what I need. I’ll be back for “the rest of the story”.