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If
you'd like to create your own web site, first of
all you need to know exactly what HTML is. I
expect you already know that HTML is what you use
to write pages for publishing on the Internet,
but we need to clear a few things up.
- HTML
is not a programming language.
- HTML
will not take long to learn.
- HTML
is almost as simple as using a
word processor.
- HTML
means Hyper Text Markup Language.
Also, HTML is not case sensitive - <A HREF="">
and <a href=""> are exactly the same. Use
whichever you prefer.
Right,
now we can get started with the actual learning.
All you will need to begin with is a simple text
editor - Notepad will do fine. However, most
editors will try to save the file as a txt file.
If there is an option to 'Save as Type', choose
All Files and add .html or .htm at the end of
your filename. If not, save it as a .txt file and
change it to .html or .htm later. These
extensions are necessary for your web browser to
render the file as a Web page, and not just plain
text.
HTML
files have to have a certain structure, so we'll
build that first. To show that they are HTML
documents, every page has to start with the tag <html>
. Tags are central to HTML, and are used for
formatting text, defining parts of the page (such as
tables, images and lists), as well as laying out
the page. All tags start and end with chevrons -
one like a less than sign at the front <
and one like a more than sign at the end >.
Tags come in two types - ones which need a terminator
tag, which is normally the same as the starting
tag but has a forward slash / at
the start, or tags which are stand-alone. <html>
is a paired, or container tag which
needs a terminator, which is </html>.
This means that everything between the <html>
and </html> tags is HTML -
so we'll want to enclose the entire file with
these tags.
So,
so far all we have in our file is:
<html>
</html>
This
is not a valid HTML document yet - we haven't
included two very important tags. The first of
these is the <head> tag.
Again, this is a container tag and needs it's
terminator, </head>.
Inside these two tags we need to put the title of
the document, and also any programming scripts we
want to use in the page. However, we really don't
need any scripts at this stage, so we'll move on
to the title. If you look up to the top of this
window (if you're running Windows that is - if
you're not, it may look rather different). Do you
see 'mirrormere.com Authoring - Demystifying HTML'? That's
the title. A good, descriptive title helps a lot,
especially when you want someone to be able to
find your site by search engines. You can use
absolutely anything for your title, such as 'My
Homepage', 'LeMoNs R US',
or even 'ui', but a short,
descriptive title works best. Try to keep it
under 72 letters (including spaces and other
characters) if possible.
To
add our title, we need to put the tag <title>
into the <head> of our
file. <title> is a
container tag again, so we will need to add the
terminator </title>. The
title of the page will go in between these two
tags. Anything after the first tag of a pair and
before the last tag will be affected by whatever
the tag's purpose is to do - in this case, to
define the title of the page.
So,
as an example, we'll choose 'All About Me'
as a title. Our code will be:
<html>
<head>
<title>All About Me</title>
</head>
</html>
Don't
forget we also need to close the <head>
and <html> tags,
as they are also containers. You shouldn't add
any other HTML tags between <title>
and </title>, as they will
just be displayed as text.
Keep this example in mind. Now, proceed to the
next section of this tutorial!
Part Two -->
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