Since you've ended up here, I'm guessing you want to make you own webpage, but don't know squad about this thing called HTML. Well, HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language, but that's not really important. Just remember that what you're about to learn is called HTML.

The thing about webpages is that they aren't what they appear to be. And here's where the HTML comes in. Every webpage is written in a kind of code. (As you may have already guessed this code is called HTML.) Your browser (the program used to se webpages, probably Netscape or Explorer) reads the code and turns it into a webpage. So to make a webpage, you got to be able to make this code, and that's really not all that hard.

Your next question should then be: "Where do I write this code?". Well, that's really the beauty of it. You don't have to gather your savings and buy a super-fancy-program. HTML can actually be written in Notepad, a little text-editor which exists on any computer. (If you don't know where it's located, do a search for "notepad.exe" on you hard-drive.) You might as well make a shortcut for it on the start-menu or elsewhere cause you're going to use it alot in the future.

HTML is based on something called tags. These tags are "words" or commands if you'd like, surrounded by a "<" and a ">". And that's really all there is to it. Now, what is the purpose of these tags. Well, it's quite simple. Here is an example:

Let's say you want to write a sentence in italic. Here's what you've got to do. You start by writing this:

<I>

If you've paid attention you'll understand that what you just wrote is a tag. But why the "I"? Well, the "I" tells the browser that the words after this tag are going to be in italic. Then you write the actual phrase:

<I>These words will be in italic.

But how does the browser know when to stop displaying the words in italic? Well, it doesn't without you telling it to. Thats's why you finish with a </I>. The "/" indicates that the style in the tag is finished. Almost every tag has a "closing tag" like this one. Your sentence should now read as follows:

<I>These words will be in italic.</I>

And here is how the sentence will look in a browser:

These words will be in italic.

Then, if you want you text to be both bold and italic you just add the bold-tags around your text. You can in-fact add more if you want to, but let's just stick to those two for now. The bold tags are <B>Bold text goes here</B>, so if you wrote this:

<I><B>These words will be in both italic and bold.</B></I>

...it would look like this:

These words will be in both italic and bold.

I know that you are eager to view you own page, but you webpage isn't ready for a browser just yet, so keep your shirt on !

If you think you got this, then you're ready to start making your first webpage!