Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) is the language of the Internet. If it sounds esoteric, it is. To add an extra space between words, for example, in HTML is &NBSP (but lower-case letters are required). But don't be discouraged so easily. There are some basic concepts that can help you to master this new language rather quickly. The first is the idea of "tags". Every time you want to change a font like this, you use a "font tag", sort of like brackets which surround the word or words to be affected. In order to see what HTML looks like, go up to your "View" menu and select from the choices "Page Source" (or "Source" in Internet Explorer) to see the HTML source code for this page that you are reading right now.
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In addition to font styles, you may have noticed that you can specify font color and font size as well using the font tags. In addition, there are things called "table tags" which control how text is distributed on the Web Page, and they can be important in controlling image placement as well. At the top of the page, you saw the "title tags" inside the "head tags", and if not, go back and look again. Below that, you notice the "body tag" at the start of the main body of the text. Included with this tag are the colours to be used for links to other pages ("LINK="), visited links ("VLINK="), and active links ("ALINK="), as well as text colours ("TEXT=") and background colours ("BGCOLOUR="). You can also note that all the tags start with "<" and end with ">". Now that you're practically an expert, you may as well also know that line breaks (or carriage returns as they are traditionally called), do not happen unless a "break tag" ("BR") is inserted at the required location. Carriage returns are useful though for keeping HTML pages looking reasonably neat. Knowing only what you have learned so far, you could create a Web Page containing impressive text formatting using only a basic text editor like EDIT in DOS for example.
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However, if you desire, you may choose to purchase software which specializes in creating Web Pages. These pages were created using Web Weaver version 6.0 from McWeb Software, but you could choose any of a number of other possible programs that would do basically the same thing. What these programs do, in essence, is make the design process relatively free of HTML. That is, they present you with a graphical interface where tags are replaced by icons and dialog boxes, and the tags are inserted automatically by the program. Of course, it is still essential to know something about HTML, so that you can edit your original design quickly and easily later. Still, as a tool, this type of program is invaluable because it lets you learn HTML at your own pace while getting you started right away doing things that will delight and amaze. Image files have a JPG or GIF extension, and can be added easily to a Web Page using the "image tags" ("IMG"), and both text and images can be linked to other Web Pages using "link tags" ("A HREF"). Other tags that you may find useful are "paragraph tags" ("P), "horizontal line tags" ("HR"), "bold text tags" ("B"), "italic text tags" ("I"), and "header tags" ("H").
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