H T M L   1 0 1 - WRITING HTML

PUT MOST SIMPLY, HTML, is a format that tells a computer how to display a web page. The documents themselves are plain text files (ASCII) with special "tags" or codes that a web browser knows how to interpret and display on your screen. HTML files can also consist of pictures, movies and sound as well.

In this course you will:

• identify and use different HTML formatting codes.
• create and modify HTML documents using a simple text editor.
• write a series of web pages that present information, graphics, and provide hypertext links to other documents on the Internet.

This tutorial teaches you how to create web pages the old-fashioned way -- by hand. There are software "tools" that allow you to spin web pages without touching any HTML. But if you are serious about doing more than a page or two, we believe a grounding in the basics will greatly accelerate what you can do.

Everything you create in this tutorial is designed to run from any desktop computer; it does not depend on access to a web server or specialized computer programming.

Getting Ready

We will assume you have a basic knowledge of how to use your web browser menus, buttons, and hypertext links.

You will also need a text editor program capable of creating plain text files. For this purpose we will use NotePad for Windows. We strongly urge that you use the most basic text editor while you learn HTML and then later you can explore HTML "editors" If you use a word processor program then you must save your files as plain ASCII text format. You should also be familiar with switching between multiple applications as well as using the mouse to copy and paste selections of text.