6.3. HTML (web page) format

We already saw in Chapter 5 that text files could be opened in Microsoft Word. They don't have any fancy characteristics, however. No bold, no fonts, no underlines... Just plain boring text.

HTML is an easy way to add some of these extra bells and whistles. HTML stands Hypertext Markup Language and is the language that web pages are written in. Since HTML documents can be read by Microsoft Word, as well as web browsers, it is a useful format to be able to write data into.

Unfortunately, fully explaining the features of HTML would be far beyond the scope of this document. However, I will give you a quick idea of how it works.

HTML consists of "mark up tags". The concept is that you have this plain text document, and then you insert these tags to identify how parts of the document should be displayed.

Most HTML capabilities have a starting and an ending tag. For example, to mark something as "bold", you use the "b" tag. The starting tag looks like this: <b> and the ending tag is the same, except that it starts with a slash like this: </b>. Everything placed in between these tags will appear as bold text.

       This is normal.  <b>This is bold.</b>