... HTML & Webpages ...

... Recommend this series to a friend.

As Alice was told in Wonderland, the best place to start is at the beginning, and I'll try not to belabor you with unnecessary details, definitions, explanations, etc. Just know that html (it stands for hyper text markup language) is a language invented by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva (so much for history). Some just say it's a bunch of tags, but what it does is "tell" the browser exactly what you want a page (or part of a page) to look like.

The tags consist of brackets, like those less than (<) and greater than (>) brackets that are taught in elementary mathematics. And within these brackets <> we place certain codes (special text) that give the browser instructions. The viewer, when opening up a webpage, cannot see these brackets, or whatever is within them. The tags are only your instructions to the browser.

Again, these tags are only seen by the person making the page, or by the viewer if that viewer right clicks on the page and then clicks "View Source" … which, by the way, is an excellent way to learn html (seeing what others do to achieve any given page). One can then view the coding, view the resulting page, and see what the tags accomplish. I would suggest your doing this only after you understand some of the basics of html, which is what we hope to achieve here. And I wouldn't suggest you do it with my pages because the lines are all scrunched up, done to save space on my backups (kept on a document with all the html tags).

All right, for starts all you need is an editor (which you have on your computer; it's called Notepad). Just for fun, open Notepad, type in a few words, click File, Save, give it a name, and save as type "html" (all found on that "save" window). Eureka, there on your desktop is a shortcut to a browser page. Open it up; that's not the way you might have wanted it to look but there it is, a page in a browser.

If you have Netscape, you can open up Composer, type in a few lines or paragraphs, Click File, Save As, give it a name, and a place to save, and presto, assuming it's on your desktop, there it is, a browser icon. Double click and it opens up to a webpage "wysiwyg" (pronounced "wizeewig" meaning "what you see is what you get"). But you still don't have full control over what you want to appear on a webpage.

Now take that browser page, the one you made with Composer, right click and go to View Source, and you see what you wrote; only now it's with the html tags included. Those are the tags that give the page the text form that you typed. If you typed two lines with a space between them, those lines would be separated in your View Source with a <P> … that's the tag for placing a space between anything on that page (text, graphics, whatever).

If you went to View Source for this page that you are now reading, you would see the <P>'s that I wrote to make these paragraphs. You might ask, "Why should we learn html when there are many programs that will take your text (using Notepad or Composer, for example), and put them into html form?" I'm glad you asked. The reason is, knowing html will enable you to make any changes and/or corrections that you feel necessary. In other words, knowing the tags (language) will give you much more control over your work.

But now, using Notepad or Composer, or any other program that knocks out html tags for you (and it's only my opinion) you still don't have full control over your page. That's because should you want to make any changes in your page, you don't have the tools of html with which to do it. You're like a surgeon without a scalpel. However, knowing a few html tags, you will be able to proofread your page, and where you see any errors, you will be able to go right to the editor and easily and quickly make any corrections.

That brings us to the delightful task of registering with a reputable web space provider (there are many; I happen to be using GeoCities), where you are provided with file manager which is a place to upload any graphics you want on your website.

They also give you an editor where you can type in your text with the appropriate html tags. And then using html, you will "tell" the browser where you want to place that text (or graphics) and give the page the look that you want. Bottom line: let's learn some html and get on with a website.