HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.  Every web page on the Internet contains some basic form of HTML.  HTML has evolved over the years and has even became other languages, but the basic pages is still HTML.

An HTML file is a text file containing small markup tags.  These markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page.   This grouping of tags is what makes up the "markup language".  If you know what the tags mean, you can weed through the code of a web page and determine what the browser is telling you.  HTML can become overwhelming at times, but after this lecture you will have some understanding.

An HTML file must have an .htm or .html file extension so that your Web browser will read it.  These extensions are associated with your default web browser.  So when you create a new Web page, you need to change the extension from .txt to .htm or .html.

 An HTML file can be created using a simple text editor such as notepad.  Since they are just standard ASCII text files, notepad will create a basic web page easily.  Although most Web designers will use an HTML editor like Microsoft's FrontPage or Macromedia's Dreamweaver, we will be using notepad for this lecture.