H-T-M-L are initials that stand for HyperText Markup Language (computer people love initials and acronyms!)

HTML works in a very simple, very logical, format. It reads like you do, top to bottom, left to right. That's important to remember. HTML is written with TEXT. What you use to set certain sections apart as bigger text, smaller text, bold text, underlined text, is a series of tags.

Think of tags as commands. Let's say you want a line of text to be bold. You will put a tag at the exact point you want the bold lettering to start and another tag where you want the bold lettering to stop. If you want just a word to be italic, you will place a start italic tag at the beginning of the word and an end italic tag at the end of the word.

Here is some very basic HTML codes:

Paragraphs

<p>A paragraph can go here.</p>

<p>Another paragraph can go here.</p>

Formatting

You can make put something in <b>bold</b> or <i>italics</i> or <TT>Typewriter<TT> or <i><b>bold and italic</b></i> - the possibilities!

<ul> is the code you would write just before where you want to start a bulleted list

• <li>This would be your first bullet point
• <li>Second bullet point
• <li>Third bullet point....you get the idea

</ul> is the code you would use to denote where you want your list format to end

Font Size Commands

Maybe you'd like a little more control over your text size. Well, here it is. The <FONT SIZE> commands. There are twelve (12) font size commands available to you:

+6 through +1 and -1 through -6. Also notice that the end command for a <FONT SIZE="--"> tag only requires </FONT>

<FONT SIZE="+2">This is font size +2</FONT>

<FONT SIZE="+1">This is font size +1</FONT>

<FONT SIZE="-1">This is font size -1</FONT>

<FONT SIZE="-6">This is font size -6</FONT>

Alignment

<P ALIGN="left">Text in here is pushed to the left</P>

<CENTER>All text in here will be centered</CENTER>

<P ALIGN="right">Text in here is pushed to the right</P>

<HR>This command gives you a line across the page. (HR stands for Horizontal Reference.) The line below was made using an <HR> tag.