Tour Guide: Nancy Warren
First let's cover a few definitions...
What is HTML? Hyper Text Markup Language - a series of text codes(called tags) that tell the browser what to display.
What are Tags? Tags are the actual commands in HTML. You will find tags in brackets.
Like this: <p align="center">
This tells the browser that the following paragraph should be centered.
Tags also close a command for example: </p> tells the browser to stop the tag and its settings.
Note: ending tags are almost always the tag name preceded by a slash.
Start the document with this: <html>
End the document with this: </html>
"Tags" go in-between.
Here is a basic web page recipe:
<html>(this begins your coding)
<head>(This begins your heading)
<title>Keep your title as relevant to the page's contents as possible since many search engines search by title of the page alone</title>
</head>(This ends your heading)
<body>(This begins your actual page)
<h1 align="center"> This is the code for the largest heading size available to you. (You can also use h2 to h6 - they go down in size as the number increases)(The align command(optional) tells the browser to center the text)</h1>
<img src="http://the source for the image you want to place">(gif and jpg files are common formats)
<p> (This starts a new line in your body of text.)</p>(This command is optional, however it is a good habit to end your tags.)
<a href="http://the address of the page">Put in the name of the link that the person will click</a>
</body>(This ends your text)
</html>(This ends your document)
Now you are almost ready to gather up the information you feel is worth sharing and share it!
You should write your HTML in a program like Word Pad, or any text program that allows you to save your file with no formatting, like margins.
IMPORTANT When you are done writing your html page in Notepad or Simple text, you must be careful. Choose Save As, then before giving the file a name, change the file type to all files. Then name your page. For instance
filename.htm or filename.html
got it?
You actually write .htm in the file name line. If you leave the file type as text documents, you will get a page named:
filename.htm.txt
NOT FUN.
To make this document available on the Web you will need to find a server to carry your page.
And, you will need an FTP program. There are some free downloadable ones from the ZDNet site.Web Pages for Work: There should be a server at your place of employment, ask how they set up files on their server.
To learn how others are doing things just select the following from the menu at the top of the browser page: view>page source to see the code.
At this point I must add that there is a great online tutorial I must recommend. It is located on a site developed by a communications professor from Louisiana. The site, HTML Goodies, has 7 primers that will give you a great base knowledge and understanding of HTML. If you want to go directly to the primers page on his site Click Here.Happy hunting!
Copyright ©2000 | Department of Polymer Science | University of Southern Mississippi