Subject: Creating web pages From: Jim Buchanan <c22jrb@dawg.delcoelect.com> Reply-To: <delco_explorers@hybiss.delcoelect.com> X-List-Processor: perlproc 0.9, By J.R. Buchanan X-Comment: Delco Computer Explorers mailing list Sender: delco_explorers@hybiss.delcoelect.com
OK, here's the first of the HTML lessons. I have some concern here that some people's email readers might try to format and display the HTML examples as HTML rather than the plain text they need to be to make sense. If that's the case, there will be sections missing, and sections that are displayed as HTML documents rather than the plain text that is used to create them. Let me know if that happens, and here's to hoping that no one has written an email client that silly.
HTML stands for "Hyper Text Markup Language". It is the basic language of the World Wide Web. It is a mark-up language, meaning that HTML "tags" are inserted into your text to tell the user's web browser how to display it.
HTML tags are delineated with the angle brackets, "<" and ">".
An HTML document always has at least two sections, the head, and the body. The head contains information such as the title of the document, and the body contains the actual information.
The head section of the document is contained within the "<head>" tag and the "</head>" tag. At a minimum, the head section of a page should contain the document title between a "<title>" and a "</title>" tag.
The body section is contained within the "<body>" and "</body>" tags. The actual content of the page is contained within the body.
As you can see, most (but not all) HTML tags come in pairs, and are used to bracket the text they affect. The second tag in the pair is the same as the first, except that it starts with a slash "/".
A valid title section could look like this:
<head> <title>A demonstration web page</title> </head>
I positioned the tags so that they would look good. You could do something like:
<head><title>A demonstration web page</title></head>
Which would work just as well, but it's ugly. HTML and web browsers are really easy-going about stuff like that, so you can lay out your source so that it's easy to work with.
A valid body could look like this:
<body> This is a test. </body>
To make a web page from the above head and body, all you have to do is combine them and enclose them within the "<html>" and "</html>" tags.
Here it is:
<html> <head> <title>A demonstration web page</title> </head> <body> This is a test. </body> </html>
Now you're probably asking, "So that's what the source of a web page looks like, but how what program can I use to create it, how can I look at it with my browser, and how can I let other people on the web see it?".
Since this post is getting a bit long, I'll answer those questions in the next installment.
-- Jim Buchanan c22jrb@dawg.delcoelect.com jbuchana@iquest.net ================= http://members.iquest.net/~jbuchana ==================== "Usenet is essentially Letters to the Editor without the editor. Editors don't appreciate this, for some reason." -Larry Wall ==================== http://hybiss.delcoelect.com ========================