Aariff Alavi: Basic HTML Tutorial

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. An HTML file is a text file containing markup tags. The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page. An HTML file must have an ‘htm’ or ‘html’ file extension. An HTML file can be created using a simple text editor. The rule-making body of the Web is World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C puts together specifications for Web standards. The most essential Web standards are HTML, CSS and XML. The latest HTML standard is XHTML 1.0.

Example: Creating a simple web page

Start Notepad.
Type in the following text

Title of page

This is a very basic webpage. This text will be displayed in bold

3. Save the file as "firstpage.html".

4. Double click the saved file the browser will display the page.

Example Explained:

The first tag in your HTML document is . This tag tells your browser that this is the start of an HTML document. The last tag in your document is . This tag tells your browser that this is the end of the HTML document.

The text between the tag and the tag is header information. Header information is not displayed in the browser window.

The text between the tags is the title of your document. The title is displayed in your browser's caption.<o:p></o:p> The text between the <body> tags is the text that will be displayed in your browser.<o:p></o:p> The text between the and tags will be displayed in a bold font.<o:p></o:p> <h2 style="text-align:justify"> HTM or HTML Extension?<o:p></o:p></h2> When you save an HTML file, you can use either the .htm or the .html extension. We have used .html in our example.<o:p></o:p> </div>