Tuesday, June 11, 2013

HTML Basics



 
Welcome to HTML Basics. This workshop leads you through the basics of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). HTML is the building block for web pages. You will learn to use HTML to author an HTML page to display in a web browser.
Objectives:
By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:
·         Use a text editor to author an HTML document.
·         Be able to use basic tags to denote paragraphs, emphasis or special type.
·         Create hyperlinks to other documents.
·         Create an email link.
·         Add images to your document.
·         Use a table for layout.
·         Apply colors to your HTML document.

Prerequisites:
You will need a text editor, such as Notepad and an Internet browser, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Q: What is Notepad and where do I get it?

A: Notepad is the default Windows text editor. On most Windows systems, click your Start button and choose Programs then Accessories. It should be a little blue notebook.

Mac Users: SimpleText is the default text editor on the Mac. In OSX use TextEdit and change the following preferences: Select (in the preferences window) Plain text instead of Rich text and then select Ignore rich text commands in HTML files. This is very important because if you don't do this HTML codes probably won't work.

One thing you should avoid using is a word processor (like Microsoft Word) for authoring your HTML documents.

What is an html File?
HTML is a format that tells a computer how to display a web page. The documents themselves are plain text files with special "tags" or codes that a web browser uses to interpret and display information on your computer screen.
·         HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
·         An HTML file is a text file containing small markup tags
·         The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page
·         An HTML file must have an htm or html file extension

Try It?

Open your text editor and type the following text:

<html>
<head>
<title>My First Webpage</title>
</head>

<body>
This is my first homepage. <b>This text is bold</b>
</body>
</html>

Save the file as mypage.html. Start your Internet browser. Select Open (or Open Page) in the File menu of your browser. A dialog box will appear. Select Browse (or Choose File) and locate the html file you just created - mypage.html - select it and click Open. Now you should see an address in the dialog box, for example C:\MyDocuments\mypage.html. Click OK, and the browser will display the page.

Example Explained
What you just made is a skeleton html document. This is the minimum required information for a web document and all web documents should contain these basic components. The first tag in your html document is <html>. This tag tells your browser that this is the start of an html document. The last tag in your document is </html>. This tag tells your browser that this is the end of the html document.

The text between the <head> tag and the </head> tag is header information. Header information is not displayed in the browser window.

The text between the <title> tags is the title of your document. The <title> tag is used to uniquely identify each document and is also displayed in the title bar of the browser window.

The text between the <body> tags is the text that will be displayed in your browser.

The text between the <b> and </b> tags will be displayed in a bold font.

HTM or HTML Extension?
When you save an HTML file, you can use either the .htm or the .html extension. The .htm extension comes from the past when some of the commonly used software only allowed three letter extensions. It is perfectly safe to use either .html or .htm, but be consistent. mypage.htm and mypage.html are treated as different files by the browser.

How to View HTML Source
A good way to learn HTML is to look at how other people have coded their html pages. To find out, simply click on the View option in your browsers toolbar and select Source or Page Source. This will open a window that shows you the actual HTML of the page. Go ahead and view the source html for this page.

No comments:

Post a Comment