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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION TO HTML


1.1 WHAT IS HTML?

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is the most popular way of creating Web pages on the World Wide Web. HTML is not a programming language at all. It is just a markup language and much more easier to learn comparing to programming languages.

What do I actually mean by a markup language? If you used WordStar before, you should know that in order to make a word or a sentence to be in boldface, you format it as follows:

/BI want this text to be in bold/b

You use similar way to markup a sentence or a word in HTML too, however the tags used is a bit different:

<B>I want this text to be in bold</B>

Next question, if it is just a markup language, why do I still see pictures on a HTML document? HTML itself is just a markup language, but it has the ability to link images to be displayed on the browser. We will talk about how to do it when we look more details into it. Please do not feel down when you still cannot understand the explanation or the jargons used in here. We will go into more details later.

1.2 WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF HTML EXIST?

There are different versions of HTML existed. The first version is HTML 1.0, then follow by HTML 2.0, HTML 3.0, HTML 3.2 and finally HTML 4.0, which is the latest version as this text was created. The features of different versions of HTML are shown as below:

1.3 WHICH VERSION OF HTML ARE WE GOING TO LEARN?

Since HTML 4.0 is the latest version of HTML supported on the internet, therefore we will concentrates on HTML 4.0 in this text. Please note that not all features or tags in HTML 4.0 are new. Most of the features or tags will be from the old HTML standard.


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