Understanding and using HTML
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. HTML is a subset of SGML (Standard
General Markup Language) and is the language used to define the layout and
attributes of a World Wide Web document as well as to create links between web
documents (documents being text, sound, or graphics).
HTML may appear intimidating at first, but once you begin to get the feel of
it, there is little to be worried about; ten different coding commands will
take care of 99% of your needs. Also, as html editors become more
sophisticated, you will find they can do a lot of the "work" for you.
If you watch television, read magazines and newspapers, or receive mail at your
home, you have probably seen a "URL" (uniform resource locator). When someone has information they want
you to access via the Web, they'll give you its electronic address, its URL.
URLs are unique to each document and are a relatively easy way to navigate
between the millions of online documents.
Knowing a documents URL allows you to go directly to it; from most browsers you
can go to the tool bar and click on the "open" button or go to the "File" menu
and choose the option "Open URL" or "Open file". Regardless of which method
you choose, a box will appear on your screen where you can enter the URL of
the information you wish to access.
For example, to access information on using a web conferencing system called NetForum , I would
provide its URL:
http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/nf_home/
You would then enter this in its entirety and click on "open." Be sure to
enter a URL exactly as it appears since they are case sensitive.
In this tutorial, we show you how to add links to other Web pages from your own home page.
(See the section on HTML commands for links.)
There are several ways an HTML document can be prepared:
- use an HTML editor such as HTML Assistant (used in this class; basic HTML tags are already
built in and you select the text and just point and click on the desired tag
located on the tool bar)
- use an HTML editor provided in your Word Processor (Microsoft Internet
Assisstant for Word for Windows 6.0)
- create an ASCII text file (using a text editor such as TED, BBEdit, DOS
edit, or any word processor that can save ASCII text)
- convert a Rich Text Format (RTF) file to HTML (most word processors give you an
option of saving a file as RTF).
There are dozens of HTML editors and converters available, both free and
commercial. Our philosophy is that no matter how good the HTML editor or
converter, you'll have to do some tweaking at some time, so knowing what all
the HTML tags mean is important. We make no recommendations on editors, but we
will mention that Netscape Gold comes with its own editor and many word
processors are now coming "HTML ready" (ie, have mechanisms for adding tags).
Regardless of what editor you use, most of them have a toolbar with the
different tags available and you select your text and then point and click on
the appropriate tag.
When naming HTML files, keep in mind that some clients require your file name
to have a ".html" extension (for DOS/Windows users, this is a ".htm"
extension). To be safe, all HTML files you create should use the ".html"
naming convention.
You can view the HTML tags for any HTML document by looking at the "source"
document that contains the HTML tags, usually called "View Source" or "View
Document Source" from the "View" menu on most clients. Using this option is a nice way to learn new
things as well as refresh your memory when working with HTML tags.
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