Section 1
BASIC HTML FILE LAYOUT and HTML TAGS (or commands) 
     For those who really want to know, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup
Language.  Here are some short notes about using HTML for creating your own
web pages.
     Almost all web pages start with an "index.htm" or "index.html" file
(the extension depends on the web server you place your web page on, but
links to your other web pages usually can use either the ".htm" or ".html"
extension).
     HTML TAGS (or commands) are always enclosed inside the greater than
and less than symbols like this <tag goes here>.  Almost all HTML tags
operate in pairs.  That is, there is one to start the desired operation,
and another one to end it.  The ending tag will have a "/" as the first
character after the "<" symbol.  There are a few tags that do not have
an ending (or closing) tag.  There are also a few that do have an ending
tag, but it can be safely left out.  More about these later.  As a bare
minimum, an HTML document must contain the following tags, and they must
be in the order shown here:
<HTML>
<BODY>
You would put the Text of your document here and any embedded HTML tags
</BODY>
</HTML>
     Please note that you must end (or close out) HTML tags in the exact
reverse order you started them.  In the above, note that it started with
<HTML> and ends with </HTML>.  In the middle are the <BODY> & </BODY>
tags.  Since they were started in this order <HTML> <BODY> they must close
out in the reverse order as </BODY> </HTML>.  You need to be carefull
about this, or you will get some really strange looking web pages!
     HTML tags are not normally case specific.  That is they can be
entered in either upper or lower case.  So <HTML> would also work if it
where <html>.  Most people prefer to enter them in upper case to make them
easier to spot, so I will be doing so in my examples here also.
     Another interesting feature of HTML is that things do not have to be
broken up (or spaced out) on seperate lines.  The above minimum HTML example
would also work correctly if it were written this way:
<HTML><BODY>Your text here</BODY></HTML>
     I will, however, try to space things out on seperate lines to make it
easier to follow.  Besides, I don't like scolling back and forth off of the
right side of the screen anyway.  There is some limit as to exactly how
many characters can go on a single line, but I am not sure of how many.
The carriage return at the end of each line is normally ignored by web
browsers in HTML documents anyway.  So I try to keep my lines shorter than
80 characters per line whenever possible to make editing easier (again so I
don't have to scroll on and off the right side of the screen).
     Although not absolutely required, I recommend you also include these
HTML tags in your web pages:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>You would put a title here</TITLE>
</HEAD>
     If you use these lines, they need to be placed between the <HTML> and
<BODY> tags.  I'll explain more about all of this in the next section.
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© 1999 miltst@hotmail.com
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(This page was last modified on: Monday, February 08, 1999)
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