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What is HTML?Web pages are hypertext documents. "HTML" stands for "HyperText Markup Language", which simply means that it's a language for marking up, or describing, the structure of a hypertext document. HTML was designed to do this in a "device independent" way. What does "device independent" mean?To access web pages, most of us use a PC and a graphic browser (either Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator) which displays documents visually, and which can display pictures as well as text. However, not everyone accesses the web that way. Many people use Macs or Unix machines rather than PCs. Some people use "text only" browsers, or graphic browsers with "display images" switched off for speed. Many blind and visually impaired users use "text to speech" browsers which "read" internet documents out loud. In the near future, fully sighted users may well find themselves using similar technology to browse web pages while driving their car. HTML is designed to describe the structure of a document in such a way that it can be understood and interpreted by all of these different types of browsers. In other words, it is "device independent". If it wasn't, you would have to create a different version of the document for every different possible combination of machine and browser, which would be an impossible task! Because many people use a graphical browser to access web pages, elements have been introduced into HTML to "control" how a page looks on screen. These elements have complicated things slightly when it comes to creating pages that can be accessed by other kinds of browsers, and because the user can always choose to override the page settings and use their own preferences (in the most commonly used browsers, at any rate), anyone designing a web page has to take into account the fact that they can never completely control how it will look at the user's end. Web design is an exercise in flexibility! If you follow the guidelines given here, your pages should be perfectly accessible in other browsers. |
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