HELP - Lesson 2/2

HTML - what is it?

It is important that you now understand that every opening HTML tag must have a closing tag, and that these tags form the whole structure of HTML. HTML - it stands for HyperText Markup Language which sounds complicated, but actually is just a way of saying that we put a marker at the start and a marker at the end of the text which we want to act upon, which will cause all text between to obey whatever instruction the marker represents.

Boldly go....

For a real example, to turn text bold we use the BOLD, <b> tag. We place an opening tag <b> before the text which we want to display bold, and a closing tag </b> after the text we want in bold, and thats it... bold text - or text MARKED UP to be bold when displayed in the browser.

Lets do it!
  • Do we still have a blank web page in our Editing window? If not then make a new one, File | New | HTML Document - no icon here in the help file this time - you should be able to do this yourself now!
  • Locate the BODY element - between the opening and closing <BODY> tags - there's probably a blank line there now anyway, so make sure the cursor is flashing between these tags, and type "HELLO WORLD" again.
  • Now preview it - pretty boring it is too.
  • Now return to the editing window, select the word "HELLO" - just double click it with the mouse - and press the BOLD or B button on the toolbar.
  • Look what has happened to your document. EHTML has automatically added those complicated tags for you. You didnt even have to type anything.
  • You have just learned both BOLD, the BOLD TAG and how to use EHTML to help you while you type.
    So HTML is just a way of describing how to display text and graphics to make a web page! Lets move on to look at some further examples.

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