What is HTML? 

HyperText Markup Language.  This is the language that is interpreted by web brows 

ers to display the formatted text, graphics, and multimedia you experience when 

viewing a web page.  

While you may use a web editing tool such as Macromedia Dreamweaver to type, for 

mat, and insert objects onto a web page, similar to creating a word processing docu 

ment, the program is also creating writing the associated HTML that will allow a 

browser to display the web page to a user as closely as possible to what you see when 

you design it.

An HTML file contains two types of text; markup text and content text.  The content 

is the information that user sees in their browser window, and the markup is the text 

that is what the browser reads so that it knows how to format the content and where to 

display it on the page.  

Markup text uses  tags  to identify the action that a browser will take when display a 

piece of content.  Tags are used to identify elements such as paragraph formatting or 

font formatting, or even starting and ending the web page.  Elements typically have an 

opening <> and closing  tag.

Elements many also contain attributes.  For example, you may use the font element to 

format a sentence, and include the color attribute to determine the font color to use for 

the sentence content.  Attributes are usually included in the opening tag of an element. 

and do not have their own opening or closing tags.

What is a web browser?

 A browser is an application program that provides a way to look at and interact with 

all the information on the World Wide Web.  The word `browser' seems to have orig 

inated prior to the Web as a generic term for user interfaces that let you browse text 

files online .  Technically, a Web browser is a client program that uses the Hyper 

text Transfer Protocol (http) to make requests of Web servers throughout the Internet 

on behalf of the browser user. 

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As a user, you can configure your monitor display and the browser options (Internet 

Explorer or Netscape Navigator) to suit your preferences.  You can change the moni 

tor display to a smaller or larger resolution, and you can edit the browser preferences 

to adjust the viewable text size on web pages.  Thus, as a web page developer you 

should consider these options when creating web pages.  A page that looks perfect on 

your computer may look very different on another computer that has a 15 , 17 , or 

19  monitor at resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768 and a browser setting 

of varying text sizes.

1.Quote provided by http://www.whatis.com/browser.htm.

Seattle University Information Technology Computer Training

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Macromedia Dreamweaver MX

Introduction