Introduction

Webpages are written in HTML - a simple scripting language.

HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language.

• Hypertext is simply a piece of text that works as a link.
• Markup Language is a way of writing layout information within documents.

Basically an HTML document is a plain text file that contains text and nothing else.

When a browser opens an HTML file, the browser will look for HTML codes in the text and use them to change the layout, insert images, or create links to other pages.

Since HTML documents are just text files they can be written in even the simplest text editor.

A more popular choice is to use a special HTML editor - maybe even one that puts focus on the visual result rather than the codes - a so-called WYSIWYG editor ("What You See Is What You Get").

Some of the most popular HTML editors, such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver will let you create pages more or less as you write documents in Word or whatever text editor you're using.

However, there are some very good reasons to create your own pages - or parts of them - by hand...