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Lesson 1 - The Basics

HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language and is the code in which nearly all webpages are written. In spite of its complicated name, the actual code is very simple. Before you can start learning HTML, however, there is one main thing that you need to know.

All commands are typed within triangular brackets < >. These are called tags. When you type something between these tags, it means you want to start a command. When you want to end a command you need to end the tags. To end a tag you type </command> . That is, you add a / after the first <.

<b>a word</b> would make a word display in bold on your page. Since the tags are ended, everything after 'a word' would not be in bold.
This is easier than I thought!

There are a few exceptions that do not need to be ended, but we will come to these later. The concept of tags is the hardest thing to grasp in HTML. Once you understand that every command needs to be inside < these tags >, you will be well on your way to mastering webpages.

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