Learning HTML is like learning another language. And while you may not have to brush up on grammatical rules, HTML has its own set of patterns, irregularities and limits. If you understand HTML and its construction, you can build, interpret and analyze web sites. Think of it this way, in the movie The Matrix, Neo can read and understand the construct on the world in which he lives in, if you understand HTML, you can do the same.

 What is a Tag?

When you write in HTML code, you are writing in tags, HTML is comprised completely of these tags. “What is a tag?” you might ask. A tag is something that is surrounded in angle brackets, for example, < and >. Know though that many tags come in pairs. In other words, you have a start tag, which looks like this, <…> and an end tag, which looks like this </..>. Let’s create an HTML tag, learning tags will help you understand HTML better. We want to write a word in bold. To do this you surround the text with the tags <b> and </b>. This is called a formatting tag, it describes to the computer how a piece of text should look. <b>Hello</b> then will look like this on a web site, Hello.

Another group of important tags to learn are headline tags. If you understand HTML headline tags, you can create and upload articles onto the web easily.

So, the tag we will use looks like this, <h1>…</h1>. There are 6 different levels of headings, they start at <h1> </h1> and get progressively smaller, ending in <h6> </h6>.

<h1>Article on HTML</h1>

text here

<h2>Sub header in Article</h2>

etc.

 Understand HTML Color Codes

 HTML colors codes are made up of three sets of hex numbers, one for Red, one for Green and one for Blue. A hex number is a little difficult to understand. There is a web site that can explain what a hex is here, but I will try and summarize it myself. Your computer stores information as single ones and zeros. Each 0 and 1 is a single value that is known as a bit. When you combine eight bits together you end up with a byte. Base 10, the HTML code reads uses these digits to represent a number: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. If we use the ones and zeros there are two possible values for each digit, 0 or 1, so this would be called base 2 or "binary." Many of us have at least heard of binary code. Computers use base 16 because it packs more values into a single space. Hex uses the following digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F. HTML actually helps to save storage space and gain efficiency.

Back to colors:

• 000000 is black (0’s for all three colors)
• FFFFFF is white (255’s for all three colors)
• FF0000 is all RED (255 for Red, 0 green, 0 blue)
• 00FF00 is all GREEN (0 Red, 255 green, 0 blue)
• 0000FF is all Blue (0 red, 0 green, 255 blue)
• FFFF00 is Yellow (255 red, 255 green, and 0 blue)
• 808080 is a gray (128 red, 128 green, and 125 blue)

 
Tricky, I know, but to understand HTML you need only sit down and read a little. You will be amazed at how much HTML affects your life, without you even knowing it. Those who understand HTML have an upper hand in our technological world. Understand how things work is always better than simply accepting that they do work. And hey, maybe you want to build your own web site one day! If you understand HTML, your web site’s limits will only be your imagination!