As has previously been stated this tutorial has been written in Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is similar to a computer programming language and requires thoughts and ideas to be expressed in a specified structure.

The Good News

One main benefit of HTML is that all files created in this language will be compatible with any browser, on any environment. Not only that but they will be in plain ASCII text - that is, text which does not have control characters or embedded binary code - so that you can easily look at an HTML file, e-mail it or edit it in a plain ASCII text editor.

Another benefit lies behind the markup philosophy of HTML. HTML is defined by Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML), an international standard (ISO 8879) for text information processing. SGML itself is a meta-language (a language to define languages). The goal behind SGML is to help format information on-line for efficient electronic distribution, search and retrieval in a way that is independent of the appearance details of the document. Without having to worry about the details of a document's appearance, the writing and production of documents can be accelerated. An organisation can have a store of reusable "chunks" of information that can be deployed into any publication easily. It is like having an "information store" expressed in terms of its structure, so that an "information displayer" can translate this store of information into any format. For example, ordered lists in HTML are defined by tags, not by a series of numbers, so that while one browser could display this list using Arabic numerals, another could use roman numerals.

The Bad News

Although the final version ( the version that can be seen in this browser) looks relatively simple the source code is somewhat more difficult to create. At first glance, an HTML file looks confusing but with an understanding of what the tags refer to, you will quickly realise the similarity with concepts you are already familiar with - titles headings, paragraphs, lists and so on.

Hypertext

To get to this page you will already have experienced hypertext. In this browser all hypertext should be in couloured lettering and by clicking on this with the mouse you will be transported to another area of the tutorial. 1