A brief history of
HTML and overview
of its syntax

The HTML Non Standard
The HyperText Markup Language is the document tagging system in which World Wide Web pages are written. It was originally designed to be an open standard across the world, but back in about 1995-96, Netscape and then Microsoft hijacked it, and started introducing their own proprietary extensions to the agreed specification. The most useful of their original extensions were incorporated officially into the mainstream HTML 3.2 standard, which has since been superceded by HTML 4.0.

At the same time, newer developments such as JavaScript, style sheets and now the prospect of XML have come along, and the mess of incompatible browsers has remained. Microsoft IE5 supports a lot more standards than Netscape 4x, but the forthcoming Netscape 5.0 promises to be the world's first proper standards-based browser. We'll have to see, but for now, we must plough on with the jumble of intermixed HTML standards and plethora of add-ons. This guide should help you to produce basic HTML which works in the current browsers, even if it doesn't meet any of the official standards. None of the browsers support the standards, so it's impossible to write HTML that does either.

General Syntax
Documents written in HTML are not as cryptic as they might look: they simply comprise standard chunks of text, as well as titles, lists, and table data, interspersed with markup tags. Tags consist of short command codes called elements enclosed in angle brackets, and each element is associated with a certain effect, such as making text bold, centering a paragraph, or including an image. Most effects require start tags and end tags, which tell the browser when to apply, and then stop applying, the chosen effect. A start tag looks like <example> and an end tag looks like </example>, for all elements. A pair such as this is technically called a container. Start tags can also contain attributes within their angle brackets, which are extra parameters giving you more precise control. You will see many examples of attributes later in the guide. You can nest tags within each other, in order to combine the effects of individual elements and produce more interesting results. There is a great number of elements within the formal HTML specification, but you actually don't need very many to create a smart and informative web page. Once you've worked through this guide, you can try the selection of other web sites, listed in the "More Help" section at the end. Those will take you on to more advanced and detailed material on HTML and all its related topics.

Controlling Presentation
Due to the way the web was originally defined, you intentionally don't have total control over how your pages will look; you specify logical markup instructions, and the browser will then render the effects in its own way, though the output should be fairly similar in all cases. During the reign of Netscape and Microsoft extensions, all sorts of extra tags started appearing in HTML, allowing you to control precise details such as font sizes and types. This may sound useful, but it lead to all sorts of problems, since the web is viewed by people using a thousand different computer types, all with vastly differing screen sizes and pixel resolutions. With this in mind, it's very easy to create something which looks great on your system, but is unreadable to millions of others. The advent of style sheets has helped to restore HTML's original purpose: as a markup language, not a presentation system. In turn, most of the real presentation-oriented tags have been formally obliterated in the newest HTML 4.0 specification. The broad concensus these days is that you should use HTML itself to structure the content your web documents, and style sheets to define their presentation. This subject area is full of continuing debate and controversy, but the last point is a very important concept, which is why we made it here, before you get too engrossed in the details of HTML.

Creating your First Documents
In this guide, the important HTML elements will be presented, accompanied by a visual example of their effect, where appropriate. Wherever an end tag is not presented, assume that one is not needed. Note that all HTML elements are not case sensitive, so although lowercase has been used throughout this guide, uppercase would be fine, and many developers use uppercase to help tags stand out. Remember that HTML files are stored as simple ASCII text files, so to create them, just use your favourite text editor program. You don't have to do any compiling or processing; just write them, and load them into your web browser to view them. When writing HTML, try to spread it out as much as possible, to make the code easier for you to read when you look back at it. Leave blank lines between paragraphs, and between sections of code, and start new tags on new lines. HTML ignores extra spaces and lines in your code, so you needn't worry about changing the final look of your document; it'll just make your own development and maintenance tasks easier.

A final warning: please believe me when I say that HTML scripting is far more an art than a science, as you battle to find little tricks that make things work in different browsers. Unfortunately, because Netscape and Microsoft have thrown the rule books out of the window, you will often have to as well!