PHOTOGRAPHY AND GRAPHICS BY JAY BOERSMA

Markup Tag Basics

The paragraph that you're reading is unformatted monospaced text. For years, this format (called "plain text" or ASCII) has been the stuff of which communication on the Internet was made. This is because plain text is the lowest common denominator - plain text documents can be opened and read by virtually any computer on any system. This text-only world has changed, however. The World Wide Web and the browsers designed to navigate it are transforming the net into a multi-media environment - one in which anyone can publish his or her own documents containing not only text of various sizes, styles, and colors but images, sounds, movies and more.

Although web pages seldom appear onscreen as ASCII text, it remains the basic material from which web pages are constructed. Transforming plain text into formatted text is done by "marking it up" with small instructions, called "tags," that tell the browser application how to display it onscreen.

Example:

Web page: This sentence has markup instructions applied to two of the words.

Source: This sentence has markup instructions applied to <b>two</b> of the <i>words.</i>

This illustrates two basic ideas used in marking up text:

1. Markup instructions are always enclosed between less-than "<" and greater-than ">" signs to distinguish them from viewable text.

   In the example given, <i> caused the text following it to be italicized and <b> caused text following it to appear as bold.

2. A markup instruction is terminated by the forward slash "/" symbol.

   In the example, <i> turned on italics and </i> turned it off. (Had the closing </i> instruction been forgotten, all of the remaining text on the page would have been italicized.) (You'll see...)

The <i> and <b> markup tags are part of the Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is a standard set of mark-up instructions that web browsers understand.

In the jargon of web designers, an html doc refers to a marked-up source document intended for viewing with a web browser. When viewed in the browser, HTML docs are called web pages.