By Brock Coffee

HTML stands for "Hyper Text Markup Language". Hypertext Markup Language is a text-based markup language used for web documents. An HTML file is a text file containing markup tags indicating the page structure. The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page. An HTML file must have a file extension of htm or html. An HTML file can be created using a text editor or WIZ-zee-wig HTML editor (Short for what you see is what you get). I recommend starting with a basic text editor. It will improve you knowledge of the language much faster.

What are HTM and HTML Extension?

There is not much of a difference between the two extensions other then the obvious letter "L". Most web browsers and servers treat the two extensions exactly the same.

Creating your fist page! Start a text editor like "notepad" or "textpad". Make sure to set any preferences in your text editor to save as "Plain Text" rather then "Rich Text".

Copy or type in the following text into your text editor:

HTML is cool!

Save the file as "myfirstpage.htm"

Ok. We are all done. Now let's view the page in a browser. Start your favorite internet browser (Internet Explorer, FireFox, etc.). Select "Open" (or "Open Page", "Open File") in the file menu of your browser. A dialog box will pop up, select "Browse" (or "Choose File") and find the "htm" file you just created "myfirstpage.htm", select the file and click "Open". You should now see page in the browser. It's not much, but it's a start.

So what happened?

The first tag in your HTML ("myfirstpage.htm") document is . This 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 tag is header information. This information is not displayed in the browser. The text between the tags