HTML is pretty simple to learn, mainly because it's not a big complicated programming language. Instead, it's what's called a "Markup Language". That's actually what HTML stands for - HyperText Markup Language. A markup language doesn't actually do anything the way a programming (or scriping) language does. Instead all it does is allow you to "markup" some text to tell another program how to interpret (or in this case display) that text. HTML is all based on tags that surround some text to tell a browser what to do with that text. Those tags will all have a similar format that looks like this: some text. Most tags will have an opening () and closing () tag (in fact, in strict XHTML, EVERY tag must have a matching closing tag), and many tags will also contain some "child" tags, which are like sub-tags. Now we just need to talk about what tags are a part of HTML...

The most basic HTML tag is that is the tag that defines the start of any HTML document, and the closing tag defines the end of that document. The tag contains two child elements (sub tags): and . The tag contains information about the document, like the of the webpage and tags that link the webpage to other documents like stylesheets. The tag contains all the text that the browser will eventually present to the end-user. To see this in action, let's look at our HTML Hello World! example:

dcPages HTML Hello World Example

Hello World!

 Just put that code into any text editor and save the file as hello.html and then open that file using your favorite browser and viola! You've just created a webpage. But this is kind of a hollow victory, and the main reason why I don't particularly like "Hello World!" examples. Because if you're like me, you want your webpage to do a lot more than just say "Hello". For example, you probably want to include some graphics () and link to some other pages ().