Putting Hyper Text Markup Language HTML to Work

This article is third in a series of understanding HTML. As I have written in my previous two articles about HTML is the language hugs to letters (or words) and markup language transported via HTTP. Well it's cool that we can see HTML but HTML is really just a language that builds those Hot Text My Love letters. What is a letter but a document right?

The previous two articles gave information about how to understand HUGs aka TAGS and how to see what others were doing via reading other's HTML. What we did not cover was how to write (or understand) a Hot Text My L.o.v.e. (HTML) letter.

When writing letters to your l.o.v.e.r. you were sure to include the important parts such as the greeting, the body, the doodles, the ending and the closing. Excluding any of these things would cause your letter to amount to anonymous scrawl. You would have been l.o.v.e.l.e.s.s and your lover clueless forever right?

HTML is really structured the same as your l.o.v.e. letter. Bullies and teachers can clearly see your letter but computers have no eyes. Therefore your letter needs a few more pieces of information so that a computer can understand.

Before you pondered what to write to your l.o.v.e.r. you pondered how to write it and what kind of l.o.v.e. letter, right? Even before you decided to write that passionate love letter you probably made a decision about your love standards. Type of person, looks, interests and a multitude of other properties your lover should have. Everyone has so many different love standards that you could get really bad advice when conveying your l.o.v.e.. If you are a guy think of your best buddy telling you to write how l.o.v.e.l.y. the girl's big feet are or perhaps how her smell is somewhat more pleasing than your grandmother. This is a sure disaster in the making with so many different standards of getting the message to your l.o.v.e.r.

Good standards yield good results and allow you to capture the l.o.v.e of your dreams. The same is true with HTML and the internet. Each letter is a HTML document that uses standards the computer understands to properly read and display your message. The good thing is that it's not your dorky buddy giving you bad advice. Standards on the internet are provided by a group of people and several organizations. These groups, organizations, and people define HTML for each type of document on the internet. However because we are concerned in this article with HTML documents we will focus only on HTML documents.

To really understand HTML you have to see it as a complete document. HTML is the words that describe the parts that make up a document. Writing a HTML letter is really quite simple as I will describe below.

The first line: is a standard declaration of the type of HTML document the web browser needs to know. Meaning, more simply, what kind of HTML document and which standard is going to be used to read it.

The second line: Tells the browser that the remaining lines are HTML

The third line: Is the HEAD (or greeting of the HTML)

The fourth line: The title of your document

The fifth line: END OF HEAD. Meaning, the end of the greeting has arrived and now proceed to reading the body of the letter.

The sixth line: The beginning of the BODY of your letter. The end of the body is the next line after all of the other lines you have written professing your love. The end of the body is right before the end of your document.

The last line: The ending of your letter telling the computer that it has read the last line of the HTML document. The computer knows this when it reaches the HTML tag at the end.

Now that I have described the basic HTML what does it look like? Below is an example:

<!DOCTYPE "a standard normally goes here">

< html >

< head >

< title >My Love Is the Greatest< / title >

< / head >

< body >

All my love forever and ever until we meet again. Write as much as you want here.

< / body >

< / html >

Notice the pattern of HUGS (aka TAGS) your love letter is a series of hugs. If you try to write your own HTML letter you use the same pattern. If you use MySpace, FaceBook, Blogs or other sites some of the letter is already written. When you write on MySpace and click the submit button you are really adding your sentences between < body > < / body > tags because MySpace does the rest.

Think of the hugs (tags) above as parent hugs and all other hugs you will use are inside of the body hugs. Think of the hugs described in my first article as child hugs contained inside of the parent hugs above. This is how you pull it all together to write cool HTML letters on the internet. Web pages are nothing more than HTML documents with lots of child hugs.

Now that you understand the basics of HTML you should be able to get going on creating your own web pages. So, how do you really begin? Simple, use HTML writing tools to help you! I have written about free tools in a previous hub. Click here for more information.