What HTML is
Hypertext Markup Language. The lingua franca for publishing hypertext on the World Wide Web. HTML is a nonproprietary format based on SGML. It can be created and processed in a wide range of software programs, from simple plain text editors to WYSIWYG programs to sophisticated authoring tools.
HTML is a mark-up language (versus a programming language) that uses tags to structure text into headings, paragraphs, lists, and links (like those seen on the NetLingo.com HTML Code Cheat Sheet). It tells a Web browser how to display text and images. You can see a Web page's HTML code if you select "view source" from the View menu in your Web browser.
A question that often comes up is how to make HTML code be visible on a page and not execute? You do this by using the ASCII code equivalents of the "less than" and "greater than" symbols (this way it is interpreted as just text and not real HTML code).
The meaning of FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
The standard method for downloading and uploading files over the Internet. With FTP, you can login to a server and transfer files (meaning you can "send" or "receive" files). Some sites have public file archives that you can access by using FTP with the account name "anonymous" and your e-mail address as the password. This type of access is called anonymous FTP. Macintosh owners use a program called Fetch; one of the best FTP programs for Windows is called WS-FTP. Knowing FTP is necessary (and easy) if you want to create your own Web site.
Note: You may also hear this noun used as a verb. For example, "I just finished FTP'ing the last of the files." Or, "I FTP'ed the new images to the site last night."
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