html image owned by elasticmind.caWe use websites every day to do all sorts of things: watch video, communicate with others, research and explore.  How is it that computers know what a website should look like to the viewer?

6th graders got behind the scenes today as we learned about hyper text markup language (HTML), a way that computers speak so that webpages show up in a way that humans can understand.  HTML is a foreign language, but we can learn to speak it and therefore have a better understanding of how websites work.

Every time you visit a website, your computer downloads the HTML code before it shows you the images, words and videos you are looking for.  You can actually see this code by right-clicking on a webpage and selecting “view source” or “view page source.” Depending on the browser you use, you may see color-specific code, where tags are one color and content another.  You can even add comments into the code that are for other coders.

We did this with a few pages and saw some similarities:

  • at the top of the code, it always says <html>, which tells the computer what language the document is in.
  • each page has a <title> tag, which shows up at the top of the page
  • HTML tags begin and end with ‘crocodiles,’ which look like this < or this >
  • a slash (/) means end/cut/stop

Next we jumped into building our own webpages!  We used a program called Kompozer, which allows you to write actual code, or just write content and have the program turn it into code.  So far we are just getting started, but there were some cool discoveries.  Kallie figured out how to change the background of the entire page, and Eli inserted some images from the web into his page.  Rebecca made one page link to another and Mason got his page open in Internet Explorer so he could see what it would look like if it was really online.