Logo Web Authoring: Creating and Editing HTML

(HyperText Mark-up Language)


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Creating and Editing HTML

What is HTML?

In order to construct Web pages you need to be able to produce HTML. HTML is a simple mark-up language. An HTML document consists of ordinary text interspersed with commands embedded between angle brackets. These commands, known as tags, control the appearance and layout of the text displayed by your browser and enable pictures to be inserted into the documents. There are also usually pointers to other target documents on the Web. Such a pointer is known as a hyperlink (or just link).

You can use your browser to view the HTML text of this page. In Netscape you click the VIEW button and then click Page Source or Document Source. You will notice that the layout of the HTML source bears little resemblance to the layout of the page displayed by the browser. An important point to understand about HTML is that unless you specify precisely how the document is to be formatted for display, the browser will simply run all your text together, with words separated by a single space or newline, as required to fill the display. Additional spaces, TAB characters and newlines will all be ignored. It is possible to insert tags such that the browser treats the text as already formatted ("preformatted text") which is useful in some circumstances, but generally it is not a good idea, because the browser will then not adjust the text to fit the display.

How to write HTML

Generally, there are four alternative approaches to writing HTML pages:

How to learn about HTML

One of the best ways of starting to create Web pages is to find other people's pages that you like and then look at the HTML that they used to create them. However, beware of copying bad HTML or styles!

HTML comes in several flavours and the evolving standard is controlled by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The current standard is HTML 4.0 and this is now implemented in many browsers. When writing Web pages, bear in mind that some people may not have a browser that implements the latest version. In addition, the various browsers all have extensions, which are not by any means universal. So keep your Web pages simple.

In the following pages (follow the button bar), you will learn the details of a selection of HTML elements and how to use them correctly. You should read through all the sections that describe the various tags, even if you plan to use an HTML editor, because there are a number of important points pertaining to HTML writing style that are discussed there, and which are difficult to explain without referring to the tags. You can also look at the links on Web Authoring, and find out about every HTML style convention and the (lack of) standards.


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Author(s): Huub Driessen
David Houldershaw
David Moss
Ian Tickle