What Access is

To log on to the Internet, where you can browse information, view Web sites, retrieve data, and send or receive e-mail. The term "access" comes from the notion that you are accessing a computer system, known as a server, that enables you to connect to other computers and "get online." You can do this with a computer and a modem through a dial-up connection (via an ISP), or over a network (such as an office LAN). Access can also be used to describe the act of retrieving information. For example, "In order to access that file, you have to FTP into the server."

The meaning of HTML

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).