You are about to embark on a journey that will transform you from a mere Internet Surfer of the Web to an Internet Author of Multimedia!
After this lesson you will be able to:
Now that you know what HTML is, let's start using it.
When a web browser displays a page such as the one you are reading now, it reads from a plain text file, and looks for special codes or "tags" that are marked by the < and > signs. The general format for a HTML tag is:
contains the "/" slash character. This "/" slash tells a web browser to stop tagging the text. Many HTML tags are paired this way. If you forget the slash, a web browser will continue the tag for the rest of the text in your document, producing undesirable results (as an experiment you may want to try this later).
Unlike computer programming, if you make a typographical error in HTML you will not get a "bomb" or "crash" the system; your web page will simply look, well... wrong. It is quick and easy to go inside the HTML and make the changes.
To complete the lessons in this tutorial, you should create a second web window (this allows you to keep this window with the lesson instructions and one window as your "workspace"), plus open your text editor application in a third window.
So you will want to be pretty comfortable jumping between different applications and windows on your computer. Another option is to print out the lesson instructions (but we really do not want to promote that kind of excessive tree carnage).
The basic structure then of any HTML page is:
The very first line:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
arial,
arial black,
comic sans ms,
courier, courier new, georgia, helvetica, impact, palatino, times new roman, trebuchet ms, verdana |
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