The Thursday Three
This week’s three are all about terminology. It’s easy to get bogged down in the technical aspects of website design or management. If you’re someone who’s not particularly technical in nature, yet you’re tasked with managing a blog or a corporate site, the jargon can sound pretty daunting. Moreover, even after you become familiar with it, you may not even know completely what it means. Here’s a start:
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is not a programming language, it’s a markup language. Basically, you use it to define containers of content and link to other things on the web. A container can be several things, like a heading, a paragraph, an ordered list, etc. If you can think of your content in terms of a hierarchy of containers (like an outline), you’ll be in great shape to keep your pages and posts organized and optimized.
Tags
Tags are the bits of code that define your HTML containers. A paragraph is simply defined by using the letter “p”, although there are a couple of other necessary symbols, you can see that it’s a simple process. The greater than and less than symbols are used to separate the tags from the content. A quick look at any bit of HTML code will give you a feel for how these tags are written and constructed.
Attributes
Sometimes tags aren’t enough on their own to get the job done, and you need to add an attribute to one of them. An attribute can’t be used by itself to markup your content, it must modify a tag. Think of it like the adjective of HTML tags. The most commonly used attribute is found in the simple anchor tag “a”. The anchor tag on it’s own doesn’t do much, but when you add the “href” attribute, and include a link to another page, it’s the most powerful and common HTML on the web, the hyperlink.
