What is HTML?

Hypertext Markup Language is the “language” used to prepare web pages.  It is essentially the “language” which tells the internet browser how to display objects on the screen and where and when to get files which need to be inserted into the page.

How Does it Work?

HTML is not really a language in the programing sense of the word.  It consists of matched pairs (usually) of tags, which are placed either side of objects to define how those objects will be displayed.  In each pair there will be an opening tag and a closing tag.

E.G.     <i>TITLE</i>  - This will italicise the word “Title”

The < > characters indicate a Tag and the addition of the / indicates an end Tag and the letter(s) indicates the name of the tag.

How do I Write HTML?

There are many ways:

The simplest in terms of software requirements and used by many Web Designers is to write it using a simple text editor like notepad or a word-processor will do, so long the file is saved as text only.

HTML can also be written with text-based authoring software.  The programs are often available free or shareware although the best costs over $100.  They allow the user to code the page manually, but have many features to automate the most common or repetitive tasks.

Using both the above is awkward because you can’t see the web page itself.  If you use Notepad, you will need to have at least one internet browser running so that you can save your file, switch to the browser and load the page to see the changes. The programs will have a viewer to alow you to examine your handiwork

WYSIWYG web authoring software is the simplest method.  Some software of this type is available free (Netscape Composer included with Communicator) whilst the best, Dreamweaver, costs hundreds of dollars. They allow you to code a page with no knowledge of HTML and you see the changes as they happen rather like desktop publishing.  They allow drag and drop for placing objects in the page, which makes life simple.  There are no true WYSIWYG tools as each web browser displays the page slightly differently!!

Office suites these days allow documents to be created and saved as web pages.  This makes web pages easy to prepare but limit the designer to the features offered by the package, which is really intended for a different purpose.  To prepare really attractive and interesting pages you would need add HTML code by another method to exploit features not supported by the software.   Word does a good job for a word processor, but the files are very large compared to identical hand coded pages and Word only offers limited features.

Why Code Pages Manually When There Are Easier Ways?

All web authoring tools have limitations which arise from the nature of web pages and users PCs. Some will not give total flexibility in page design whilst others produce inefficient code, which will slow down page loading. Even Dreamveaver or Front Page will not always allow you total control unless you can modify the code yourself. So many web authors still code manually. 

It is essential to have some knowledge of HTML if the most effective, efficient and attractive pages are to be written.

Writing HTML Code

HTML tags define all the formatting in web pages which is rather useful since any carriage returns or spaces (except for one between each word) will be ignored by the internet browser and therefore not displayed in the web page.  You can therefore space out the code in order to make it easier to follow. The browser must be able to interpret the tag itself so the name of the tag and any parameters must be complete and unbroken.

Any unrecognised tags will be ignored.  This is useful as older browsers do not understand the newer tags.  However, tags must be paired or the browser will mistake them for text and print them and their parameters to the page.

Remarks may be added (which will also not be displayed) to remind you or others of what a particular section of code does.

The format of a remark is <!Text content of the remark>

There is no such thing as a web page?

The web page is not one item like a word-processed document.  It is a collection of files.  The page itself does not contain the pictures and sounds you may add, for example.  It simply contains a link to the picture/sound file.  Thus when you want to move or copy the page you must move or copy the associated files also.  Should you delete the associated files your page will not display properly.

Using Notepad

Using notepad to code pages is easy once you know some HTML but a little painful as you will need to switch to a browser to view the page.  The procedure is: