Lecture 05 - Applications #3.1: HTML and HTTP Basics

Digression: HTML

Although it is not "core" knowledge in this unit, we really need to mention HTML.

HTML is an example of a markup language -- documents are (in general) plain ASCII textfiles, with certain characters/symbols reserved to denote markup. Such languages have a long and venerable history in computing (eg starting with *roff, TeX, (see also here), LaTeX, SGML and subsequently XML.

The structure (or, to a somewhat lesser extent, the displayed appearance) of a HTML document (or Web page) is described using embedded formatting codes (or tags) intermingled with the information in the document.
In HTML, the markup tags are delimited by the special characters "<" and ">" -- the "less than" and "greater than" characters, often (rather clumsily IMHO) called "angle brackets". If either of these characters must appear as part of the actual data, they are written as < and > respectively.
HTML introduced a uniform, and revolutionary, way of specifying hyperlinks in a document, using the <A HREF="...some URL...:">link text</A> structure. This was (and is) revolutionary!
Modern HTML standards have evolved to support incredibly complex document layouts (using the <TABLE> markup, style sheets, client-side scripting, etc), seemlessly mingling text and graphics into what has become an entirely new form of media.

If you're interested to see some very simple hand-crafted HTML, have a look at the document source for these lecture notes...

Lecture 05: Applications #3.1: HTML and HTTP Basics

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