Yes, pretty boring, I know. But it's the language websites use, like it or not.
And it's what makes a website appear on your computer, and my computer, and anyone's computer. A computer translates the HTML into what you see on the screen. You see pretty photographs, wonderful graphics and perfect text. Your computer, or a search engine, sees the HTML.
That's all you really need to know about it. Don't worry, I'm not going to go into a long and detailed explanation about HTML; you'd go to sleep. But there are just a couple of things I'd like to explain.
I've noticed that clients send copy and assume that we 'copy and paste' it into their site. "Attached" they'll say in their email, "is new copy for the website. Please add it as soon as possible". Or "Here is a news article to go on our site. It must be up by 11am." (This is usually in an email received at 10.30am).
OK.
The first thing we have to do is convert your copy to plain text. Copy is almost always sent in Microsoft Bloody Word. Word, or any other word-processing program, adds its own formatting. That formatting is not compatible with HTML. So no, we can't 'just copy and paste'.
But that's not all. The copy on your website will be divided into cells. It is those cells that instruct a computer how to display that copy. If you really want a further explanation, see the related post link below.
So we have converted your copy to plain text. We have painstakingly added it to what might be a hundred cells. Now, we have to code it.
Remembering that it is the HTML coding that ensures that your website looks the way you want it to be, regardless of the type of computer and type of browser the end user has, special characters and things such as bulleted lists have to be coded accordingly.
What's the difference between decor and décor? The accent over the 'e', of course. Does this happen magically? No, that 'e' with the accent has to be coded. (Please remember this if you are a restaurant and want your wine list online. Wine lists are full of accents (both acute and grave) and umlauts and circumflexes and cedillas and tildes ... (and that ellipsis).
Regular menus are the same with the crème brûlées, entrées, jalepeños, hors d'œuvres and so on.
But you might not be a restaurant and not have accents all over the place. Then what? It might surprise you to know that the average text on a website is littered with characters which require coding. For example, ©, ® and ™. Even the em dash (—), the en dash (–) and the ellipsis (…). Yes, there is a lot of difference between ... and … and between — and – also.
Here are just a few more:
"
&
¡
¢
£
¦
§
°
²
½
“
↓
∗
Or let's take something simple like a bulleted list. If you are using Microsoft Word, you'll click a 'list' button and lo and behold, your text will be a bulleted list. Here's a very simple list:
- Apples
- Oranges
- Bananas
- Strawberries
And here's the coding that created that list:
<ul>
<li style="color: #333333"><font face="Trebuchet MS" size="2">Apples</font></li>
<li style="color: #333333"><font face="Trebuchet MS" size="2">Oranges</font></li>
<li style="color: #333333"><font face="Trebuchet MS" size="2">Bananas</font></li>
<li style="color: #333333"><font face="Trebuchet MS" size="2">Strawberries</font><br>
</li>
</ul>
Yes, just for a simple four line list. Remember that this has to be hand-coded. We do not have a magic button.
Here's another thing. Email addresses have to be encrypted so that they won't be collected by programs which are searching the web for email addresses to add to spam lists. Here is the code for my email address as it would be if I was adding my address to a website:
<a href="mailto:jackie@tang
ledspider.com
"></a>
Plus, of course, this has to be coded so that it's a clickable link and on clicking, the viewer's email client will open a new email with your email address already in there. So even "just add these three new email addresses to my site" is not a quick job!
Related topics:
What is a cell?
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