How Much HTML Should You Know?

My friend Donna Horn [LINK] tweeted this morning about HTML and inspired this post.

@inspiricity hmmm. seems like knowing how to write #html is as basic and necessary these days as addition and subtraction…

While I don’t believe that knowing HTML is as ubiquitous a skill set as basic math, I think it is a completely necessary skill to have if you’re a knowledge worker – especially one who has to maintain an online presence. My short answer to the question is “you don’t need to know very much HTML.” Here’s the long answer:

CSS vs HTML

Back in the days of HTML 2.0 (when I made my first website), webpages were very simple and if you knew a little bit of HTML, you could put together a decent website. Frankly, the bar was pretty low. These days, most people expect your site to be a lot flashier than what you could do in 1995. For those of us who aren’t professional web developers but who want to pull together our own website – platforms like WordPress are the answer.

WordPress [LINK] is a content management system (CMS) like many others on the market. While WordPress is quickly becoming one of the most popular platforms, other popular platforms are Drupal, Joomla!, PHP Fusion, Moodle and Typo3. What all of these platforms do is divide your website into templates (the look and feel of the site) and content (the text, images and other media that you string together to make a page or blog post).

Most of us non-web developers are never going to get into building templates from scratch. You need to have some programming chops to make a good looking template. Instead, most of us hire a web developer to design a custom template or buy a pre-made template from a template vendor like ThemeForest [LINK]. Templates use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to tell a web browser what colour the page background should be, what fonts your site uses and how the page should be laid out. Again, if you are not a web developer, trying to tinker with CSS is going to give you a major headache.

Your actual content (like this blog post) is written in HTML. All you need to know to pull your content together is some basic HTML such as how to embed links, format text and insert media.

HTML Tags

A good content management system like WordPress will have buttons that will add HTML tags to your text automatically (see example from WordPress 2.9.2 below).

Sometimes, you need to tweak the HTML manually. Most CMS platforms like WordPress also give you the option to edit the raw HTML. This is what that looks like:

The bits of text around your writing is the HTML. HTML is always written inside angled brackets. For example, if I wanted to write “my name is Aaron” in bold text, I’d write it in HTML like this:

<b>my name is Aaron</b>

The “b” character tells the web browser that the text needs to be bolded. You also need to close your tags. That’s why I put the “</b>” at the end of my block of text. Here’s a list of other HTML tags you should know – [LINK].

Other Uses for HTML

Even when you’re not writing your own web content, it’s handy to know a bit of HTML. Most comment boxes on other people’s blogs and websites will allow you to format your comment using HTML. For example, if you want to drive a point home, you can bold your text. Most comment boxes will automatically convert any web addresses (URLs) you insert into an HTML <a href= …> link.

Forums and bulletin boards (BBs) often use a limited or modified version of HTML markup to format comments. The “preview” button on forums and BBs is your friend in these cases. Most forums and BBs use the square bracket format instead of the angel brackets used in HTML. For example, if you wanted to bold a line of text, you’d write:

[b]my name is Aaron[/b]

This is very close to what HTML would look like but in other cases, the coding is a lot different. Here’s an example of how you would embed a link in normal HTML and then a typical forum:

HTML: <a href=”http://www.ignitia.ca”>Check out my website.</a>

Forums: [url=http://www.ignitia.ca]Check out my website.[/url]

If you’re not sure what tags to use in a forum or BB, see if you can find a user guide.

Learning HTML

My advice if you really want to learn HTML is to check out w3schools. [LINK] This organization is the body that sets the HTML standard and they have some excellent tutorials available for free on their website. All you need to learn is your computer’s notepad software. Hardcore HTML coders can throw together a website without any kind of HTML editor or CMS. Have fun!