Basic HTML

If you are using Frontpage or Composer or Dreamweaver to create your web pages those programs write the HTML for you so this is not really necessary although it is good to know how web pages work.

Text Editor
The first thing to know about writing HTML by hand is that you will need a text editor. A text editor is different than a word processor like Microsoft Word©. A text editor does not have all the formatting options. On a windows based PC there is a program called “Notepad” and on a Mac the built in text editor is called “Simple Text”. These will save your file with only what is displayed on the screen. A word processor will your document in a format only the word processor can read.

File Names
The extension on the filename that tells the browser to display it as HTML is “.html”. This means all HTML files you create should end in “.html”. For example if you want to start a test file name it “test.html”. The default file in a folder or directory must be named “index.html”. This is the first file the web server will serve when a browser requests a url without a specific file like http://www.tqnyc.org.previewdns.com/NYC040123/.

What is HTML?
HTML or HyperText Markup Language is the language of the Internet. HTML is a way of formatting text so a web browser can display it. HTML is a set of “tags”. Tags are letters or words between brackets like these “<” and “>”. All most all HTML tags have an opening tag and a closing tag and the tag will affect whatever is between them. The closing tag is the same as the opening tag but there is a forward slash (/) after the first bracket (<). For example a set of “bold” tags looks like this “ “.

Most tags also have parameters. Parameters hold extra information that tell the tags how to do something or where to find something. A font tag has a parameter of “size” and a parameter of “face”. The face parameter is for defining what font should be used, like “arial” or “helvetica” or “Times New Roman”.

There are many tags and they all do different things. Below you will see a table of tags with explanations of what they do. The standards group that authorizes or suggests what the standard for HTML should be is the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). On the W3C web site you will find the formal standard for all HTML tags including all of their parameters. They have an HTML Validator which you can use with your web page URL and it will tell you if it is up to the standard and if not point out why. Web browsers are forgiving and will display incomplete HTML or non-standard HTML to a point. Some browsers are very good about suporting the standards and others are not so good. The best way to check your HTML is to open your pages in multiple browsers to insure they work for everyone.

HTML is a simple language to pick up and you can publish amazing things will only a few tags, yet it is complex enough to display web pages in infinite ways.

Below is a list of HTML tags. You can find more thorough tutorials and tag lists at the following urls

<html>
The HTML tags should be the first tag and the last tag of your page.

<head>
The head tags usually open immediately after the HTML tag at the top and close just before the body tag opens.

<title>
The title tag usually start right after the head tag opens and the title tag contains the title of the page. This is the text that will appear in the top of the browser window or in someone’s bookmarks if they bookmark the page.

<body>
The body tags defines the main body of the page to be displayed. This is where you define background color (bgcolor=), text color (text=) and link colors.

<b> or <strong>
The bold or strong tags makes the text they surround display as bold.

<i> or <em>
The italics or em tags makes the text they surround display as italics.

<u>
The underline tags makes the text they surround display underlined.

<p>
The paragraph tags makes the text they surround display as a paragraph.

<a>
The anchor (or link) tags define the text they surround as a location. An anchor tag with the “href=” parameter defined is a link.

You can also have anchor tags within your page so you can have a link with an href that makes a link to jump up or down the page. Imagine at the bottom of your page you enter “ ” and then at the top you have a link that looks like this “go to the bottom of this page “. The link at the top of the page when clicked would tell the browser to display from the “bottom” anchor. This is what is known as an inline link.

<br>
The break tag is an exception in that it has no closing tag. The break tag adds a line break. You can use break tags instead of paragraph tags.

<img>
The image tag also has no ending tag. The image tag tells the browser to display this image. An important part of the image tag is the “src=” which is the source or URL (web location) of the image file. So a image tag looks like this <img src=”{image file name}” alt=”" />