A quick primer on the markup language of the web

Without turning this book into a lesson on web development, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. Every web browser has a suite of tools for web developers, but even without those, you can view the page’s source to see it differently. What you see when you do is an example of a markup language. HTML is a series of tags that surround page elements. These different tags mean different things.

For example, the <p> tag denotes a paragraph:

<p>A paragraph of text.</p>

Similarly, the <b> tab is used for bold text:

<b>Text in bold</b>

You don’t need to worry too much about what’s happening behind the scenes as a documentarian, as most tools handle the conversion between how you write and HTML for you. However, it’s good to have a basic understanding of what’s happening, as often, working as a solo documentarian involves a lot of customizing tools. So,...