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The "Creating Content" Lesson is part of the full, Introduction to HTML course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson's course:

Jen explains what each line of the HTML scaffolding does and demonstrates how to open a web page in the browser.

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Transcript from the "Creating Content" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> Jen Kramer: So go on down now and put your cursor in between the body and the slash body tags right there on line 10. And if we write, Hello, world!
>> Jen Kramer: Hello, world! My name is Jen.
>> Jen Kramer: I live in Boston.
>> Jen Kramer: Minneapolis is awesome.
>> Jen Kramer: I don't know, whatever else you wanna write here, okay?

[00:00:38]
>> Jen Kramer: Go on ahead and save that.
>> Jen Kramer: Refresh your web page.
>> Jen Kramer: Hopefully it shows up. Did it show up? Whew, my work here is done. See you all later. [COUGH] Okay? So it's that simple in terms of getting texts up on your web page, that simple, okay?

[00:01:03]
Well all you have to do is type some text in, and it will show up for you. All right, let's say I'm going on here. One of my hobbies is playing the flute. I play in an orchestra back in Boston. We have a concert coming up on November 11.

[00:01:30]
I don't expect anyone to type what I'm typing. I'm just blabbing away here. You do the same thing on your web page. So clearly I have two paragraphs going on here, right? Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and save that. And I'm gonna refresh my web page.
>> Jen Kramer: Yeah?

[00:02:02]
>> Speaker 2: If you wanted to format it to actually look like two different paragraphs, would that just be like a br break?
>> Jen Kramer: Well, isn't it interesting? So Dylan notes that I wrote two paragraphs over there in my code, but if you look at my web page, what happened?

[00:02:17]
I have what looks like one paragraph, right? [COUGH] Okay, so just because you write code into the body of the document doesn't necessarily mean it has formatting. All right, formatting is a dirty word when it comes to HTML. We don't talk about formatting with HTML, all right? Expunge it from your memory, no formatting in HTML.

[00:02:41]
What does HTML stand for?
>> Speaker 3: Hypertext Markup Language.
>> Jen Kramer: Hypertext Markup Language, what on earth does that mean? What is language? Let's start there. What is language?
>> Speaker 4: Communication.
>> Jen Kramer: Some kind of communication, right? We have spoken languages and written languages, we also have computer languages, right? You've probably heard of some of these.

[00:03:04]
C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, right? These are all languages, right? So this is also a language of a kind. Then we have markup. What does markup mean? Yeah?
>> Speaker 5: It came from editors of books, when they would mark up the author's work.
>> Jen Kramer: Yes, it comes from the concept of long, long tradition of publishing, right?

[00:03:37]
Where editors would mark up books about what the author should be doing and how we should change things around. You've all seen that before, right? You've been to school before, you've seen it on a paper somewhere. Some teacher marked up your assignment. Okay, same kind of thing here.

[00:03:53]
So markup is the concept that all we're doing here is we're identifying the structure of our document. So what is the title of this document? What is a paragraph? What is a heading? What is a list, okay? This has nothing to do with how it looks. How it looks it's gonna come from what?

[00:04:15]
>> Speaker 2: CSS.
>> Jen Kramer: CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. That's all about making things pretty and we are gonna do that tomorrow. Today we are gonna make the ugliest web pages you have ever seen, okay?
>> Speaker 3: So do web developers not think of making lists or paragraphs as formatting?
>> Jen Kramer: They shouldn't.

[00:04:30]
[LAUGH] They shouldn't. They often do. But you should not. You should think about, what am I trying to communicate here? We're gonna talk a lot about this today. What am I trying to communicate here?