Hugs To My Letters (or words) HTML

When one of the teenagers in our home decided it was time to pimp-up their MySpace pages I was asked, what is HTML and is it easy to use?

This is how I answered the question; HTML is a language for marking up your words or letters on your MySpace page. However, to keep it simple just think of HTML really meaning Hugs To My Letters (Or Words).

I took this approach because, after working in the technology industry for many years I had discovered it’s very hard for technical people to explain highly technical things to people with no experience, such as our teen.

Our teen sat up and looked at me intently and was clearly interested in what I was saying. I said, you know when you type (-: to create a smiley face with your IM right? Yes, she replied. I said, when you do that at the end of your IM sentence you are tagging your sentence with a smiley. Well HTML works kind of the same way. You use special characters together to show something on the screen like a smiley face. However, with HTML you are doing neat things with words instead. So, to give you an example, let’s say you want to make a letter or word BOLD. You hug it with a set of special characters at both the beginning and end of the letter or word.

I typed an example on the computer screen for our teen as <b> My Words </b> and said b stands for BOLD just like your (-: stands for a smiley face. So, you have hugged your words with a B making it bold.

Wow… was the reply is it that easy? What else can you do? I said, just like the different emoticons for your IM, HTML has many different characters to put at the beginning and end of your words and are called tags. There are simple tags, link tags, image tags and a whole lot of tags you can use to dress up your MySpace. Simple tags for Bold, Italics, and Size are as simple as hugging your words with <b></b>, <i></i>, <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, <h3></h3>.

The next question was what about color? I said, color is more of an extra long hug to your words or sentence where you tell the hug what color you want. I went on to say, you have to add the word FONT to you hug as well as color. I typed on the screen <font color =red>My Red Words</font>, you see your words are now hugged by color.

Our teen said, what that’s cool and everything but not as cool as some of the stuff I have seen. Well, I said, that’s because I didn’t tell you yet about hugs on hugs. This means if you add two or three hugs to your words you get different effects on the words. So far we talked about bold and red. So here is an example of a double hug; <font color =red><b>My Red Words</b></font>, your first hug <b> is hugged by the color creating a bold color word.

Oooohhhh, okay was the response, but how about all of those other things like pictures and music I see on MySpace? I said, Images and music use special hugs, <img></img> and <object></object> tags. These hugs require more love and attention to learn. Our teen, realizing it was going to require more work to be cool on MySpace was losing interest in what I was saying. Recognizing the loss of interest, I quickly pointed out how to see the hugs that others were creating. That was the attention holder as our teen didn’t realize she could see how others were doing it. Soon, after reading other MySpace pages and asking questions our teen was novice HTML writer and I no longer needed to refer to HTML as Hugs To My Letters (Or Words). Wow, sometimes teens learn faster than you would expect!

Hug on you non-technical people and you will be a geek before you know it.