  |
|
|
|
The Basics HTML is the language of the Net. It's a simple, universal mark-up language that allows Web publishers to create complex pages of text and images that can be viewed by anyone else on the Web, regardless of what kind of computer or browser is being used. Despite what you might have heard, you don't need any special software to create an HTML page; all you need is a word processor such as Microsoft Word. Lotus Word Pro or even Notepad, and a working knowledge of HTML. And lucky for all of us, basic HTML is really easy. HTML is just a series of tags that are integrated into a text document. They're a lot like stage directions - silently telling the browser what to do, and what props to use. HTML tags are usually English words (such as blockquote) or abbreviations (such as "p" for paragraph), but they are distinguished from the regular text because they are placed in small angle brackets. So the paragraph tag is <P>, and the blockquote tag is <BLOCKQUOTE>. Some tags dictate how the page will be formatted (for instance, <P> begins a new paragraph), and others dictate how the words appear (<B> makes text bold). Still others provide information - such as the title - that doesn't appear on the page itself. The first thing to remember about tags is that they travel in pairs. Every time you use a tag - say <BLOCKQUOTE> - you must also close it off with another tag - in this case, </BLOCKQUOTE>. Note the slash - / - before the word "blockquote"; that's what distinguishes a closing tag from an opening tag. The basic HTML page begins with the tag <HTML> and ends with </HTML>. In between, the file has two sections - the header and the body. The header - enclosed by the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags - contains information about a page that won't appear on the page itself, such as the title. The body - enclosed by <BODY> and </BODY> - is where the action is. Everything that appears on the page is contained within these tags. Over the next few pages, I will be introducing you to the very basics of HTML authoring. Please note, that this will be just the basics, which will give you a better understanding of how to design a very simple web page. We will be using the Windows Notepad program to write our web pages in. Introduction over... now let's get down to business. So let's
create our first simple page, shall we? We will be using good old Windows
Notepad for this exercise. <HTML> Now save this
as "index.html". Note this is in lowercase, this is good practice as
some web servers are based on Unix and these servers are case sensitive. The tags that we have used are the headline tags. <H1> is the tag for a headline (the largest headline, in fact) and there are a total of 6 headline tags with <H6> being the smallest. You've just
written your first piece of HTML, it's a bit basic, but we all have to start
somewhere. Over the next few pages we will be adding some more basic commands to
this example. |
|
