HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. What's that? That sounds even worse? Right. Let's go back in time a little. You used hypertext when you started using Windows, probably before you had ever heard of the Internet. If you clicked a Help menu, and it said "Click here" to go to a fuller explanation, you used hypertext. It became even more important with the invention of the World Wide Web, not the same thing as the Internet. The Internet had been there for some time but was so complicated it could only be used by geeks. The Web is not the whole of the Internet, but it is the prettiest part and the part which works most easily for those with little technical knowledge.
This is an HTML file, created in Notepad (more of this later) using raw markup. HTML is a markup language which can be read by a browser, that is, a program which reads pages on the World Wide Web and, in turn allows you to read them. When you start writing files, however, you can sve them on your computer. A browser can be used without connecting to the Internet. If you buy an Internet ready computer it will almost certainly have a browser, usually Internet Explorer, but there are others. If you are writing pages for the World Wide Web this is the language you will use. There are two main ways of doing this. Using a simple text editor, like Notepad, you type your text and your instructions which tell the browser what to do. These last are called markup, and are enclosed in angle brackets (<>). Most word processing programs also have HTML editors which will let you choose the command from a menu. Some browsers also have such editors and there are even more powerful stand alone editors. You will probably want to use one of these eventually if you have to do a lot of typing. It is best to start with raw markup, typically in Notepad, to learn the commands and to practise laying out your page, markup and all. This document was begun in just this way. A further sentence was then added using the HTML editing facility in Microsoft Word. This caused a whole page consisting of new heading content and a stylesheet to be put in. That is one reason for starting with a text editor: a word processor can land you with a lot of code that isn't doing anything obvious. The document head is the place to put the title, which is the name which goes at the top of the screen. A lot of other stuff can also go in there which need not detain us now.
Once again in Notepad, some adjustments were made to the stylesheet. This enabled a colour for the first heading and a size and colour for a sub-heading to be specified at the start of the document, one of the functions of stylesheets that prevents the text part of documents getting too cluttered with markup. If you are reading this on a computer, click the link below with the mouse: