History of the Internet and WWW
Exercise: Hand-code your own page
Simple freeware WYSIWYG editors
Exercise: Make a page with AOLPress
HTML Basics
Jeff Williamson
Northern Virginia Community College
www.nvcc.edu/home/nvwillj/html-basics/
nvwillj@nvcc.edu
What is HTML?
HTML - Hypertext Markup Language. A universally agreed-upon set of codes for text files used to display documents. Developed by Swiss researcher Tim Berners-Lee around 1988. HTML takes simple text documents and displays them with more meaningful markings - headings, lists, etc.
Background: Computer files are either text or binary.
Text files have only text, numbers, some punctuation, spaces and line breaks, but no formatting. They require no software interpretation; all platforms and programs can read text files. E-mail is usually just text files.Binary files are just 1's and 0's, so they require software interpretation. Therfore they are platform and program-dependent; Word 8 for Windows is needed to open Word 8 for Windows documents. Anything that's not text is binary. Most everything you work with on a modern computer is binary.
Binary files basically try to convey richer information, but in a simpler format (1's and 0's). Therefore they are usually much, much larger than text files, so they transfer much more slowly over a network (this is why e-mail is fast, but attachments are slow), and they are limited to the same platform and program they were created in.
HTML is a way to get binary richness from small, quickly-transferred, universally-readable textfiles.
So why don't we do everything in HTML?
Much of what we like in software is platform or program-dependent. Spreadsheet calculations, for example, are binarily coded for each program and operating system. So are many printing functions, such as fonts, margins, and page breaks.
HTML offers speed and universal access at the expense of functionality (HTML table cells can't do calculations) and fine control. You can define certain things in HTML pages, but because your users will access them with widely varied platform and program combinations, you cannot fix elements as firmly as you can with a printed page.
One last note: HTML has its origins in information processing, and not in graphic design. Therefore its bias is towards information, rather than design. This is not an important point at first, but it will eventually come up.