Starting HTML- part1 -An introduction to HTML

Starting HTML Part 1

Introduction

This is a beginners guide to starting HTML. It is for people who have never written any HTML before and want to learn the basics of HTML.

This guide consists of short tutorials containing exercises which I recommend that you do on your own computer. Is is designed to teach you all the HTML you need for making basic web pages and more even more importantly for editing and other HTML web pages.

Learning HTML isn't strictly necessary in order to make web pages or indeed a website. There are many tools (web page editors) which make leaning HTML unnecessary for making web pages.

In fact today very few people make web pages by hand coding HTML and many web masters probably couldn't. However, if you understand basic HTML then you will find it much easier to make and edit web pages, and more importantly, to insert scripts like Google Adsense and website counters etc into your web pages.

Before starting html you need to have a few basic tools:

Tools needed

Text editor like notepad or an HTML editor like Trellian codepage.
Web Browser like Internet explorer or Netscape Navigator.

We will start by making a web page using notepad and then switch to using Trellian Webpage as it is much easier to use and far easier for beginners than typing the code manually.

In order to make some basic HTML web pages and display them using a web browser we do not require a web server. Everything we will be doing will be done on our own computer. I recommend you create directory on you computer for these exercises. I've used c:\webs\BYO in the exercise examples:

We will start learning HTML by making some basic web pages and examining them rather than learning HTML and then making web pages. Therefore before starting HTML we need to learn a few basics about HTML and web pages.

What are web pages

Web Pages are simply text pages with special formatting Tags which describe how the text appears i.e. is it bold, which font etc. This formatting is called HTML- Hypertext Mark-up Language.

Your first Web Page - An Introduction to
HTML

Here you are going to familiarise yourselves with HTML and at the same time make a Web page. The tool we will use to make your first Web page is a simple text editor called Notepad which is available for free on all versions of windows. I recommend you follow these exercises on your own computer.

Exercise 1

1.Open Notepad and type the following:

Make Your own Web pages-for free

2. Save the file as my-first-web-page.txt in a directory on
your computer (eg C:\webs\BYO directory).

3. Close Notepad and then open the File my-first-web-page.txt in notepad. Notepad should display my-first-web-page.txt as shown in Figure 1 below:

make your own web pages -1

Figure 1. Text page displayed by notepad

What you have created is a simple text file meant to be
read by a text editor or word processor and it is displayed correctly.

Exercise 2

1. Now open the file my-first-web-page.txt in notepad and change it
to the following:

<HTML>

Starting HTML- my first web page

</HTML>

2. Then save the file as my-first-web-page.txt. Open the file again using notepad. Notepad should display my-first-web-page.txt as shown in Figure 2 below:

make your own web pages -3

Figure 2. An HTML page as displayed by notepad

Notepad doesn’t know that <HTML> is actually a formatting tag and not meant to be displayed, so it displays it as normal text.

Now save the file this time as my-first-web-page.htm and then open it again. This time it should open with Internet Explorer. Internet explorer should display my-first-web-page.htm as shown in Figure 3 below:

make your own web pages -3

Figure
3. An HTML page as displayed by Internet Explorer

Notice that the <HTML> tags are missing as the browser knows what to do with them and uses them to structure and format the text but doesn’t display them.

File Extensions .htm and .txt

The file extension .htm or .txt defines what application is used to open the file. Files ending with .txt files are opened by Notepad (or any other text editor) and .htm or .html extensions are opened by Internet Explorer.

Extensions .htm and .html

Web pages have the .htm or .html file extension e.g index.htm or index.html. Which one you use is up to you but if you start using .htm then stay consistent and save all you files as .htm files. All web pages on this server use the .htm extension and not .html.

Continue to next---->part2

Starting HTML sections

Starting Html -Intro
Part1-An Introduction to HTML-Your first Web Page
Part2-HTML TAGS Explained
part3-Formatting Text - Fonts
part4-Lists and Tables and Images
part5-Anchors and Linking