nce you know what you want your Web site to look like, you have to explain that to your Web browser. To do this, you need to use HTML.

An HTML file is just a page of text, like an email message or a word processor document. In fact, you can use a word processor to write HTML code. Or you can use pretty much anything that allows you to type something in and save it as a text document. Web browsers want only text, that's it. They can't deal with anything else.

An HTML file contains all the writing that will appear on your page, plus instructions to the browser about where that writing should go and how it should look. And if you have any pictures or animations or sounds or whatever that you want to include, the HTML file will tell the browser where to find them and where to put them on your page. HTML does this by using things called tags.