With so many texts and web materials available on HTML, why another primer on the latest communications rage?
The mystique of HTML is over-hyped. One vendor of an expensive HTML engine (winner of the coveted one-star award for lousiness) boasts, "No Programming Needed!"
HTML is NOT a programming language. It isn't even a scripting or macro language. A quality HTML engine like Adobe Pagemill will help get your feet wet, but its genre is really best for bulk-processing large batches of text files to get them on the Net quickly. The best of these still need editing and still need some knowledge of HTML.
If you buy one of these engines, it's like buying a rider-mower for that 6x10 lawn patch in your front yard.
All you need to know to get started is the basics. Even these are over-hyped and made to look more difficult than they really are. If you've looked at Netscape source listings, of course they look intimidating. The Mac carriage returns have been replaced by line feeds, so everything is crammed together. Just hitting the return key at appropriate spots starts turning it into orderly lines the eye can interpret easily.
According to the former WebTechs HTML Validation Service, the following template covers any basic needs to set (or test) any web page:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE><!-- your title here --></TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<!-- Your HTML test data -->
</BODY>
</HTML>
That's It? Well, almost. Stick a title, "My Life's Story And Then Some", in between the paired HEAD tags (enclosed in L-brackets). Your title should completely replace the comments field and the brackets which enclose it, so it looks like this:
<TITLE>My Life's Story And Then Some</TITLE>
Similarly, insert your life story in place of the comment field for "Your HTML test data".
You now have a functional HTML document. SAVE it to disk with a name like "MyStory.html" (Unix servers don't like spaces, and '.html' tells what kind of document this is). VIEW it in your browser. It should look OK, except for one thing:
Your life story is all run together. It doesn't have paragraphs, line feeds or text styling. There's always "one more thing". Go back to your '.html' doc that you created. In the BODY of your story, add the following markup tags:
 |
<p> paragraph breaks between paragraphs (these are NOT paired) |
|
<br> break tags to force a line feed (also not paired) |
|
<b> and </b> tag pairs encapsulating text to be made bold |
|
<i> and </i> tag pairs encapsulating text to be made italicized |
|
<hr> to generate those neato horizontal lines |
Go back and view your masterpiece in NetScape or other browser now. Now view it as source code. (You can also export the browser window as source code using "Save As"). It would pass for 80% of the pages on the Web now. Of course, you may want to add lists, graphics, hotlinks to other pages, and other bells and whistles until folks start complaining about your pages. First, you can find out how to link these pages to other web pages with anchors, add images and other basics that make the Web so useful. Like many surfers, you will SAVE AS source code live examples of code and effects you like, so you can analyze it offline (on your hard drive) and see how it is done. We have HTML references to Cool Mac Sites to make it easy to expand your HTML vocabulary.
E-mail: Write Summitlake.com Alex Forbes
This page was first posted 1/28/96. Last updated July 28, 1996