Intro to HTML

In the past few years, the growth of both the WWW and personal computing has taken the Internet from the priviledged communications within the scientific and technical professions to the desktops and kitchen tables of millions

The “Web” is recognized nearly everywhere as the fastest growing communication medium in all of history. Terms once regarded as high-tech, such as Web site, browser, and hyperlink have become mainstream.

The “Web” or “World Wide Web,” is the area of the Internet that allows you to display text and graphics and play videos, aqnd movies. With appropriate equipment, you can even receive and broadcast live audio and video.

The Web consists of a network of Internet servers, called Web sites. Web pages are individual documents often connected to onterh Internet documents by hyperlinks. Hyperlinks offer you many options for accessing information quickly and easily on the Web.

A Web site stores information that has been organized into individual hypermedia documents, Web pages, and holds it on a server for distribution across the Internet.

A hyperlink , or link, usually appears as colored, underlined text, or a graphic on a Web page. A link is a jumping-off point for moving from one subject to another.

On the website www.Athinker.com, the text link Students at the bottom of the page connects you to the web page that contains information for students.

In this course, you will learn the basics of creating and displaying hypermedia documents using Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. The first two lessons of theis course establish a foundation in HTML. The remaining lessons provide you with hands-on experiane in creating Web document elements.

A hypermedia document is a document with a format that can be displayed online, in a browser. In practice, hypermedia documents are often called HTML files, although they may contain many ontehr types of files.

In this lesson, you will define HTML, examine HTML design issues, and identify the elements of a Web page.

DEFINING HTML

HTML is not a word processing tool, desktop publishing application, or programming language.

HTML is a tag-based markup language you use to create Web pages.

In the following sections, you will examine using tags, examine creating files, and view sourse code.

Using Tags

When you creat a document for the Web, you include HTML tags to communicate the way you want your text and graphis to appear. Tags include angle brackets (<>) called "Wickets" so that the browser recognized the text between them as HTML code. Tags are often, but not always, used in pairs.

A browser is a software applicaiton that allows you to view HTML documents, whether Web pages or HTML files, on your own computer. Two popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Tags are instrucitons taht specify how a browser should display the text and graphics on the Web pages.

For example, a browser recognizes the following as an instruciton to display the text between the tags as italics. Notice that you do not apply italicas to the text _ just the italic tags.

This text will appear in italics.

[BROWSER DISPLAY] This text will appear in italics

The first tag, , is the opening tag, the second tag, is the closing tag. In an HTML document, the text between the two tags is formatted according to the instructions specified by the tag.

Notice that the browser displays the results of the tags, but not the tags themselves. In this module, you will use common HTML tags to format text and graphics on Web pages.

Viewing the tags without the text, you can see that the code pattern is a s follows:

Noteice that when tags are nested, the end tags are in reverse order, so that the end tag comes before the end , even though the starting tag came before the starting tag .

HTML coding depends on syntax - the order and logic behidn the way tags are applied. for example, certain tags are common to all documents, and those tags appear in a standard order. Tag and attribute names must always be spelled correcly, but HTML is not case-sensitive. Therefore, <BODY>, <body>, and <BoDy> will all be treated the same by a web browser.

[INTRUCTOR NOTE] For this course we will be writing all of our tags using upper case so they stand out when viewing the HTML code.

Spacing withing lines of code is also irrelevant. The browser ignores hard returns, so you need to use an HTML comand to insert a space between lines. In the code examples and exercises in this course, the code is written on separat lines for clarity, although it is not cecessary.

IMPORTANT NOTE!! Although HTML codes are not case-sensitive, file names in many applications ARE case-sensitive. Pay careful attention to capitalization when you include the name of another file or Web document as a link in your HTML document. To keep the process simple we will be using lower-case letters for file names.