HTML Concept

An LAMP server presents itself to the world through a network cable, the computer itself likely does not have a keyboard or a video monitor. When you point your web browser at the IP address of the server it responds by sending a web page. The most basic of all web concepts is that pages are just text with interspersed tags that control formatting and other things. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is the term used to describe interweaving.

If you want a dreamsite you cannot avoid learning something about HTML. It was developed as a way for a server to describe the look of a page using an English-like stream of simple text. At its simplest HTML simply specifies the look of text.

For example, you bold a word like this:

<b>bold</b>

You cannot see the <b> and </b> tags in this bold word because the browser is not displaying them. But they are there, it is interpreted them as instructions on what to do with the words between the tags.

You italicize a word like this:

<i>italic</i>

Headings are done with tags this look like this:

<h1>Main Heading</h1>
<h2>Second level heading</h2>

Fonts like this:

<font face="Arial">This phrase is Arial</font>

Colored text is done like this:

<font color="red">This is red text</font>

A horizontal rule simply like this:

<hr>

Pictures are inserted on the page like this:

<img src="mypicture.jpg">

and there are ways to control where the image is placed.

There are other tags to justify in different ways, control margins, arrange things as a table, etc.

This information enables us to answer the simple question: 'What is a web page?' in a more accurate way. A web page is, at its lowest level, some text interspersed with HTML tags stored as a file on a webserver.

However, due to the magic of PHP (a computer language) and enhancements over time to the way Apache parses page files as it delivers them, a web page is now much more. Program code can be intermingled with the HTML and text. This code gets executed as the page delivered and it surmise information filled into a form and can talk to the SQL database server and do all sorts of calculation and processing tasks.

Only custom-written web components can go down any road you choose!

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