What is a web page

A web page is a document designed to be viewed in a web browser, using a standardised language (usually called HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

These pages are delivered over the Internet to your browser using a protocol called HTTP.

HTML is a very simple language. If you use your browser to look at the source view of a standard web page, you will see it uses a series of tags using < and > brackets. So for example if you can find a bit of code like this <title>some text</title> you will see that the text inside is the same text as displayed in the browser title bar (usually followed by the browser name).

These tags describe the content, the formatting, and the location of the text or image. Many newer web pages use a Cascading Style Sheet to apply the same formatting to many web pages, so the tags simple have a reference to a class or an id that is then looked up by the browser before applying the formatting.

Links, usually known as Hyperlinks are simply links to other pages, and displayed images are simply JPEG, PNG or GIF files usually also located on the web server, referenced by an image tag in the web page code.

Fancier graphical effects are produced by using an embedded file that triggers a browser plug-in, such as Adobe Flash or Apple QuickTime.