Interest in and use of the World Wide Web has been expanding at a phenomenal rate. As the Web grows, so must its vehicle of communication, HTML.

The HTML 2.0 specification was published in November of 1995. Since then, the HTML 3.0 draft specification expired on September 28, 1995, without becoming recommended, but HTML 3.2 became a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendation on January 14, 1997.

The public draft for HTML 4.0 was released on July 8, 1997 and was officially recommended by the W3C in December that year. Then the current HTML5 standard was first published in 2009 but not ratified as a standard until October of 2014.

In addition to this official work on HTML, the browsers have been making their own additions to HTML. Some changes were eventually adopted into W3C HTML Recommendations; others remain proprietary coding aspects that only the individual browsers recognize. The browsers’ versions of HTML changed, too, in a game of marketing and programming one-upmanship, hoping to lock Web developers into using one browser or the other exclusively.

HTML characteristics

html stands for Hyper Text Markup Language- it is a “formatting” language not a programming language. An extremely simplified explanation of how works is that it works by turning on and off formatting options TAGS.

for example the following html :

<p> the <i>silly</i> <b> dog</b> jumped up </p>

over the <i><b>tree </b></i>

would render in a browser as below:

the silly dog jumped up

over the tree

Writing html rules

• The formatting options are called TAGS
• Tags are always written within < > angle brackets eg <p> beginning of a paragraph
• Generally TAGS are closed off by writing the tag with a </  > eg </p> end of paragraph
• Tags can be nested but they should be closed in the reverse order of what they are opened
  eg: <i><b>tree </b></i>
  NOT
  <i><b>tree </i></b>
  
• With the implementation of html tags can written in upper or lower case
  eg <P> is the same as <p> and both are completely valid

As the title state this is just a quick overview so that will do on rules for now 🙂

HTML development Tools

To write html you only need the simplist of text editors (MS Word is not a text editor!!) a program such as Notepad will allow you to write perfect HTML – I’ll admit slowly but it is still a perfect tool. And then all you need is a browser such as Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox or Safari to name a few to check your rendered HTML documents.

In professional environments you would more than like be using tools along the lines of  Notepad ++, Sublime text, Composer, Dreamweaver or a million other options.

Your development tool doesn’t matter its how well you know and how well you use it!!!

Here are a couple of handy links

html tag reference guide

CSS reference sheet

html colour codes