What HTML Uses & What It Doesn't Use.

Uses:

     <  >  "  &  (and / a lot)

Doesn't use:

     tab  extra-spaces  Return-key

HTML, the language of the World Wide Web, is short for HyperText Markup Language.

HyperText = highlighted words that let you jump to another page

Markup Language = a way of putting stuff in a diamond, like <stuff>, so that the diamonds control what everything else looks like

If you are looking at this on line, a computer program called a browser takes the words and diamonds (saved in a simple text file called the source) and makes them look good. You don't see the diamonds here but, in the source file, they come in singles and doubles that look like:

     <TAG>     or     <TAG> ... </TAG>

Double-TAGs contain text (like bookends contain books) and the second diamond always starts with a / .

When the browser comes to < or > in the source file, it normally doesn't show these. If you want to tell the browser to show them, you have to type an Escape code. These always start with & and end with ; . However, now when the browser comes to a &, it will interpret this as beginning an Escape code! So you need to type another Escape code just to get the & to show by itself. Quotation marks need this too, because they are often used in TAGs, to contain URL's for example.

  to show     type Escape code
     <             &lt;       (  lt =  less   than)
     >             &gt;       (  gt = greater than)
     &             &amp;      ( amp = ampersand   )
     "             &quot;     (quot = quotation   )

Thank goodness you don't need an Escape code for / .

Since diamonds control what text is marked up to look like, the way you space out the text in your source file gets wiped out -- ZAPPO! What you do with the tab, extra-spaces, or Return-key is empty whitespace that gets eliminated. The diamond TAGs do all the work.

The source code that shows up as &gt; looks like &amp;gt; so what does the source code for &amp;gt; look like? First, guess. Then try to find out, either by going to the View selection on your browser's menu bar and selecting Source, or by saving this page in source format as a text file and then opening up the file using a word-processing program.

&amp;gt;