[This article first appeared on MWEB iTutor]
DIY HTML - Part 1
Page 1, A piece of cake
If you're itching to say "I would have built this page differently", if you're dying to know how to do it all yourself, then you're at the right place. Let me start by saying that to write HTML doesn't require genius, vast computer knowledge or a particular ability to grasp acronyms.
Writing in HTML is a piece of cake.
HTML means Hyper Text Mark-up Language. It's the backbone to making a web page look the way it does...like the way this one does for instance. So into the deep-end with ya! Place your mouse cursor somewhere on this page (in the white area to the left or right would be good) and right-click your mouse once. A menu will appear with various options; choose the "view source" option and feast your eyes on that.
Okay, take it easy. You don't have to learn how to do all that in a hurry. That's the HTML code for this page. To a greater or lesser degree that mumbo-jumbo has been 'read' by your browser (probably Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator) and the browser has done it's best to interpret and display that information (pictures, colours, words, etc).
The development of the Internet has been rather haphazard. Things, technologies have been created and continue to be used in a way unlike what they were intended for. The Internet and HTML were never even intended to support or show images. In the early days, web pages were just supposed to contain text. So I think that's the best place for us to start.
As the name implies, HTextML, requires that it be written in and saved as a text file. This is absolutely neccessary for a browser to read the html file that you create. You'll want to work in NotePad when you write your HTML, because more advanced word processors tend to insert all sorts of formatting gobbledeegook that doesn't qualify as text. You can work in WordPad but then you MUST be sure to save that file as a text file. If you don't, when you call up your web page to be viewed it'll be a right mess.
Open up NotePad (you'll find it under "accessories" along with your computer's calculator and what not). On the top menu bar click on "file" and then "save as". You'll see that your file is automatically going to be saved as a text file, that's good. It'll also ask you to give the file a name: call your file "index.html". Don't include the "" though. You could call the file anything before the "*.html", the important bit is the ".html": this tells the browser that it must expect an HTML file to read and display.