HyperText Markup Language is the code responsible for all formatting of web pages. In their purest sense, web pages are plain text. The paragraph breaks, bold text, links and other formatting all come from HTML incorporated into the plain text. Most web browsers have the ability to show all these HTML tags. If you are using Internet Explorer, click the View menu and select Source. This will show all the HTML of the page you are viewing.

The special code used within HTML utilizes tags. Tags are instructions to your browser that explain how the plain text is to be displayed. Tags are placed into the HTML in a special way so that a web page browser does see them, but instead sees the end result.

If a word or phrase on a web page is to be bold, a tag is placed around the word(s). The plain text code would look like this

If a <strong>word or phrase</strong> on a web page...

All HTML tags are inside the greater than/less than brackets <>. These brackets tell the browser to change the way the "tagged" text is to be displayed. The above example of HTML has a beginning and an end. The beginning is the <strong> tag and the end is the same tag with a slash </strong> placed in front of the tag word. You will see this sort of tag when formatting fonts, links, tables and forms. In these tags, there is a clear start to the formatting and then a clear end.

Tags that do not have a beginning and end are things like a line break. HTML doesn't consider a hard return in text to mean anything. If you wish to have the text wrap to the next line at a pre-determined location, you must insert a <br> tag.

Here is the text
without a break

Here is the text<br>
with a break

Here is the text without a break.

Here is the text
with a break

Notice in the above example that a hard return in the HTML code does not show up in the browser. The special "line break" code must be inserted to tell the browser where to start a new line.

Other tags of this type include image (graphic) tags and special codes, like a non-breaking space.

There are several tags that you must know. They are the fundamental building blocks that you will use over and over as you create web content. The following pages will demonstrate each tag and how it is used.