HTML and Browsers
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language that allows you to decide how the various elements (text, graphics, links, forms, etc...) are disposed on a web page. A HTML document is nothing more than a text file with indications about the text colours, positions of the images inside a page and similar things. Basically a HTML file it’s a set of instructions on how to visualize the different elements inside that page.

The browser is the software that is used to when the web is surfed and it mainly do two things:

- Download the different files that are located in a remote machine (server) and that refer to a web address.
- Reads the documents wrote in HTML and according to the indications found on the HTML file, it visualizes the page and assembles the various elements and files (images, flash, etc…).

Various types of browsers exist; Internet Explorer is the most famous being included in windows OS. But others browsers exist, such as Netscape, Opera, Mozilla etc…).

The important thing to be a web designer is not really to know HTML in every single detail but more to know how the HTML code will be visualized in the user’s machine.
We will notice that different browsers have different ways of visualizing the code.
To avoid “troubles” in different browser we should strictly follow the HTML standard, which is given by an organization that standardize the HTML syntax, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). W3C released different versions of this language (HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2, HTML 4.0) and at some point HTML evolved in XHTML (which is HTML reformulated as XML language).

The version we will refer at is the last released: HTML 4.01, December 24th 1999.

Even if we just said that HTML evolved in XHTML there are important reasons to start studying HTML.

- For a fact HTML will still be used as the main language for web pages.
- Some concepts of XHTML already require a certain comprehension of problems that can be acquired only through experience.
- If you know XHTML you HAVE to know HTML first. The knowledge of HTML is in fact the essential prerequisite for any webmaster and the differences between the two languages are not so big