the basics

First, web pages are written in plain text.This is so they can be interpreted by any operating system. It doesn't matter if you use Windows, macintosh or Unix/Linux, they can all understand plain text.

Second, the web page is written with special coding called "markup" which tells the browser how to display the plain text.

For example, to display some text in bold face, a special "tag" is used. The tag for bold is <b> to start the section to be bold face, and </b> to end the section.

This is a simple example. There is a large number of tags.

To make things more complicated, most of the tags have "attributes" which let you modify the tag. The tag to draw a horizontal line is <hr>. However, its attributes let you define its width, height, alignment and whether it appears in three-d.

If the tag used is <hr> the result is:

---

But, if the tag used is <hr width="50%" align="center"> then the line appears like this:

---

In the pages that follow, you will be shown the correct use of many, but not all of the tags, and many attributes.

Note: The tags and attributes will comply with the standards of HTML version 4.