1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

Who’s afraid of HTML? 153
I have just written that sentence using Microsoft Word. It looks
fine on this Word document, but there is not a lot more I can do
with it.
If I went into Notepad and wrote:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
then saved it as dog.htm, my web browser would make lots of use
of the information in , but would not show any of it .
The text in brackets form the tags and they provide the browser
with the code it needs to display the text I want to show (The
quick brown, etc.) in the way I want to show it. As it is a web
browser, it would show it in a way that other similar browsers
would understand. Hence, the universality of the web.
You might think that this is not particularly clever. If you send
a Word document to another PC loaded with the Word software
(i.e. a floppy disk), you can also read the document there.
However, HTML is special for a number of reasons.
First, the HTML code can also point your browser to files where
you have stored still pictures, graphics, audio and video. Second,
it can present all these things on the screen in an orderly and,
sometimes, attractive manner. Finally, it can tell your browser to
jump to other HTML files, written by yourself or anyone else and
which might be stored on different computers, whatever type of
browser they use – the much-vaunted hyperlink.
So HTML is worth learning and you can see it easily by going
to your favourite web site and looking at the home page. Go to the
tool bar at the top of the page and click on ‘View’.
You will be offered various options, including ‘Source’. Click on
that.
What you should then see is a separate page showing all the
HTML required to put that single home page together. Start
scrolling. Two minutes later, stop scrolling. You will still be on that
first page of HTML. There is a great deal of it. That is why people