Step 3: Creating Your Pages

HTML

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the language that you'll use to define the layout and attributes of a World Wide Web document as well as to link between Web documents, e.g., text, images or multimedia. HTML is a subset of Standard General Markup Language (SGML).

HTML may appear intimidating at first, but only ten different tags will take care of 99% of your needs. Also, HTML editors have become sophisticated enough to do a lot of the work for you.

URL: Uniform Resource Locator

To access a Web page, you'll need to know its unique Web address, i.e., its Uniform Resource Locator (URL). In most Web 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 page." Regardless of which method you choose, a box will appear on your screen where you can enter the URL of the page you wish to access.

For example, to point you to information about antivirus and security at NC State, I would provide its URL:

    http://www.ncsu.edu/it/essentials/antivirus_security/index.html

You would then enter this URL into the field provided by your Web browser. A URL is case sensitive and must be entered exactly as it appears. If you've received a URL electronically (e.g., in an email or on a Web page), copy and paste it into the Web browser's field or other desired location rather than re-typing. This reduces the chance of error, especially for very long URLs.

You will also need to know a Web page's URL if you want to create a hyperlink to it from a Web page of your own.

Methods of preparing an HTML document

There are several ways to create an HTML document:

• Use a full-blown WYSIWYG HTML editor, such a Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Adobe's GoLive or Microsoft's Front Page.
  
• Use a basic HTML editor such as NEdit or Wedit. Basic HTML tags are already built in. You just select the text and then point and click on the desired tag located on the tool bar.
  
• Create an ASCII text file (using a text editor such as BBEdit, Notepad, Wordpad or any word processor that can save as ASCII text, i.e., a file with a .txt extension) and then insert HTML tags manually.

Most editors have a toolbar showing the different tags available. You simply select your text and then click on the appropriate tag.

NOTE: Many word processors now have mechanisms for adding tags to a document, but some of them (e.g., Microsoft Word) may also insert invisible characters. These can cause problems when you use the document as a Web page. To avoid this, be sure to

• Create your Web page with an ASCII text editor, HTML editor or HTML-friendly word processor.
• Revise your page with the same program you used to create it.

No matter how good HTML editors and converters are, occasionally you'll have to edit the HTML tags by hand, so it's important to know what they do.

HTML file extensions and the source document

Most Web browsers require that your HTML file name have a ".htm" or ".html" extension. To be safe, consistently use one or the other of these extensions on all HTML files you create.

An easy way to first learn about HTML as well as to refresh your memory is to look at the "source" documents for existing Web pages. You can view the HTML tags for most HTML documents on the Web. This option, usually called "View Source" or "View Document Source," can be found under the "View" menu in most browsers.

Go on to Step 4: Basic HTML tags for text

Go back to Step 2: Planning your pages

Return to the Introduction

Last modified March 19, 2007 by cawalker