<b>text</b>. There are also tokens for
hyperlinks: <a href="URL">text of link</a>.
makes the text be a link to the specified URL.Most WWW browsers (including Netscape, NCSA Mosaic and Lynx) allow you to also look at the HTML source for the document. Do that now for this document ("File/View Source" in Mosaic, "View/Source" in Netscape). You can use this feature to figure out how other documents do things.
HTML is a logical layout language: you specify that certain parts of your document have some semantic meaning. It is not a physical layout language, you do not generally have control over exactly where your text will appear. There are good reasons for this that are too lengthy to explain here.
HTML interpreters tend to be pretty forgiving. For example, there are all sorts of header tags you're supposed to have, but few clients require them. This HTML document pretty much conforms.
Yahoo has a lot of references for HTML. A good (albeit somewhat out of date) reference for HTML is the HTML primer. It has links at the bottom that are even better. The HTML quick reference by Michael Grobe is also good. And the HTML reference at CERN is recommended.
If you are using emacs, you might enjoy using html-helper-mode, a major mode for editing HTML that makes some things easier. The keybindings list contains a pretty extensive list of HTML codes.
Here is a list of a few common HTML codes you will want to use:
<title>my title</title> Document title <h#>text</h#> Make text a header of size #(1-6) <p> End of paragraph (very useful!) <a href="URL">text</a> Make text be a link to URL <ul>list items</ul> Unordered list of items <li> text One item in a list <img src="URL"> Inline an image (pointed to by URL)