HTML 4/5 with CSS Course

Hi and welcome to this tutorial series on learning HTML, the predominant markup language for creating web pages. My name is James Gonzalez. I'll be your guide through this tutorial. covering the world's most popular web programming language with more than 250 million North American users on the Internet at the time of this recording and more than 1.6 billion worldwide surfing the many millions of sites on the Web together with the explosion of personal Blog pages and the many small businesses now getting on the Web, it's no wonder that HTML has stayed the course as the most popular web programming language. The skills learned in the study of HTML will be fundamental to learning more advanced programming technologies such as JavaScript, PHP, Flash ActionScript and many, many others including the more popular HTML editors such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web, or FrontPage. The ease of learning html will have you quickly adding links, embedding images, sounds and video, and creating the types of visually appealing and dynamic websites that are in so much demand today. So, what exactly is HTML? Well, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It's a language which makes it possible to present information on the Internet via a web browser. As I mentioned, HTML is the predominant markup language for describing web pages. Hyper Text Markup Language allows for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists and more, as well as for links, quotes and other items such as images, video and objects to be embedded on a web page. These elements can also be used to create interactive forms. Now what you see when you view a web page on the Internet is your browser's interpretation of the HTML. To see the actual HTML code of a page simply click on the View, Source - or Page Source - in your browser and that'll open up a window that will show you the HTML code as it will be interpreted by the browser. Let me further describe each term in the HTML abbreviation. Hyper is the opposite of linear. In the early days, computer programs ran in a linear fashion. The program would be executed one line at a time and in a specific order. First line ran first then the second line and so on. But HTML is different. You can go wherever you want and whenever you want in whatever order you want. For example, it's not necessary to visit Google.com before you visit Wikipedia.org. The text is a bit self-explanatory. The language is written all in text characters but it's also, the original version only dealt with text. Later images were added and then audio and the later versions of HTML also included video, the possibility of video playback. Markup is what you do with the text. You're marking up the text the same way you do in a text editing program with headings, bullets and bold text and so on. Language is a useful term here because HTML actually uses many English words. HTML was actually invented in 1990 by scientist Tim Burners-Lee. Its original purpose was to make it easier for scientists at different universities to gain access to each other's research documents and data. The project became a bigger success than Tim Berners-Lee ever had imagined. By inventing HTML he laid the foundation for the Web as we know it today. One of the big reasons for HTML's success is that it's platform independent, meaning that it can be written and viewed on any type of computer - Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux, whatever. Another reason is that html is very simple to write and simple to learn. HTML is actually not a programming language but, as its name implies, a markup language. A user need not be an expert programmer to make use of HTML for creating hypertext documents that can be put on the Internet. Markup languages use a set of markup tags to describe or instruct. HTML is written in elements consisting of tags surrounded by ankle brackets within the web page content. You can see examples of these tags in this page Source that I'm viewing here in Firefox. Notice that there is a style tag. Here is another style tag here. Here's a head, closing head tag, center tag and so on. Now to add functionality, HTML can also include and load scripts in languages such as JavaScript, which affect the behavior of HTML processors like web browsers. You can also use cascading style sheets, abbreviated CSS, to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. Much more about each of these topics a bit later in the course, but right now let me move on to the next movie and describe more details about this course and what you'll need in order to start writing your own web pages using HTML.  

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