What is HTML and how does it relate to shopping cart software?
HTML is an acronym that stands for HyperText Markup Language. This is the code that most web pages are created with. When you look at a web page what you see are the results of that code, you should never see the code itself. If your browser is Internet Explorer (about 80% of web users), you can see the HTML code by clicking on Page, then View Source. This will open a Windows utility called Notepad and this shows you the code that was used to create the page you are currently looking at. Doing this reveals a basic fact about web pages: there is always code behind every web page that produces what is seen by the web page visitor.
This code is translated by your browser, whether it be Internet Explorer, Netscape, FireFox or any of the other browsers available. That is why you always need a browser to view a web page. Web pages written in HTML have what is called an 'extension' and it will look something like this : http://www.anysite.com/webpage.html or http://www.anysite.com/webpage.htm. The 'extension' is located at the end of the line and consists of the '.html' or '.htm'.
As you look at other web pages, you will probably come across some pages that do not end in the traditional '.html' or '.htm' extension. Instead you might see '.php', '.asp' or something else. These are some of the different programming languages that have emerged to give web pages more flexibility and greater capabilities. Each new programming language contains many of the basic elements from HTML. Web sites might have web pages with a combination of these programming languages. However you design your shopping cart software, our online shopping carts support what you have
Your web site may be written entirely in HTML or one of the other languages. Either way it will contain some elements of HTML. The pages in your online shopping cart will also contain code either entirely or partially written in HTML.
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