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Many people I know have asked about HTML and what it is used for. HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language. Last year, I started to “hang around” the Ask a Tech Question Message Board on Nick.com and I noticed a lot of posts had been made with lots of decorations such as different colors or fonts and font sizes. I thought it would be a good idea if people were able to learn about HTML.

HTML is great for making webpages. I started when I was 9 using Adobe Pagemill, and now currently use Microsoft FrontPage XP. If you want others to be able to see your web pages, you must have an account on a web server. Often your ISP will provide space for your web pages (usually called ‘personal home page’). The other thing you must remember is that all images (pictures, drawings, etc.) must also be on the web server, and references in your web page to those images must point to the image on the web server.

OK, now I would like to share some HTML basics.

With very few exceptions, HTML consists of pairs of tags – a “start” tag that tells the browser to start some display option, and a matching “stop” tag that tells the browser to stop that action.
For example, to get bold-faced type, you put a <B> before the text you want to be bold, and </B> when you want the bold to stop.

<B>bold text goes here</B>
<I>italic text goes here</I>
<U>underlined text goes here</U>

Tags may be combined…

<I>this will be italic text<B> and this will be bold italic text</B> and this will be regular italic text again.</I>

An ‘anchor’ tag is used to create a link to another page. It has two parts:

<A reference_to_something_else> clickable text</A>

The most common use of an anchor tag is to put in a hyperlink which will cause the viewer’s browser to link to another page. The page may be a different page at your site, or it may be a page at a completely different site.

<a href=page2.html>Click to go to Page 2</A>

For example, here is a link to the Google search engine.

<a href=http://www.google.com> Click here to go to Google</A>

If you want to include an image (a picture) you may do it with the IMG (for IMaGe) tag.

<img src=http://pics.ebay.com/aw/pics/navbar/ebay_logo_home.gif>

An image may be used within an anchor link—so that clicking on the image will take you to another page:

<A href=http://www.google.com>
<img src=http://www.google.com/images/res0.gif>
</A>

In the above example, the image provided by Google would be clickable and have a blue border around it, indicating that it is a link. If you don’t want the blue border, then you may specify that there is to be no border via an additional “attribute.”

<A href=http://www.google.com>

<img src=http://www.google.com/images/res0.gif border=”0” >

</A>

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