HTML is Easy!

David Wallace Croft
croft@alumni.caltech.edu

1997-10-08

HTML is Important

It is now the universal mechanism of communication.

It is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year all over the world.

It is your business card and your advertisement and it costs you nothing.

It allows you to share your thoughts immediately and archives them in a universal format.

Browsers are Tolerant

You can get started by simply renaming a plain text file!.

You don't even have to rename the extension from .txt to .html if you don't want to.

To get started, login in to your account and look for a subdirectory called "www" or "public_html".

Create a plain text file in that directory called "index.html" with some test text such as "This is a test."

Your web page address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL), is probably exactly the same as what the other users have except that it has your user name. Type it in and see if it works!

HTML is a Markup Language

It is easy to <B>make your text bold</B> or <I>put it in italics</I> or <U>even underline</U> it! By inserting these markup tags in your plain text, you can do almost anything.

You can View Source to see how others are doing it.

There are plenty of easy HTML books.

Learn now. It will be useful forever.

Word Wrapping

It word wraps the text to fit any screen on any browser platform.

You can turn word wrapping off by using the "preformatted" tag. 
<PRE>
  This was a
  plain text
  file that
  was prefor
  matted to
  fit a small
  column and
  I like it
  that way.
</PRE>

Text Size

You can make your text bigger or smaller. Watch as <BIG> my text gets <BIG>bigger</BIG> and </BIG> even <SMALL>smaller</SMALL>.

You can also adjust your text size using an outline format.

<H1>...</H1>

<H2>...</H2>

<H3>...</H3>

<H4>...</H4>

<H5>...</H5>
<H6>...</H6>

Lists

You can make ordered (numbered) and unordered lists. 

<OL>
<LI> Apples
<LI> Bears
<LI> Cats
</OL>
<P>
<UL>
<LI> Apples
<LI> Bears
<LI> Cats
</UL>
  1. Apples
  2. Bears
  3. Cats

Formal HTML

A web page should start with <HTML> and end with </HTML>

A web page has a head and a body.

Your basic template looks like this. 

<HTML>
<HEAD>
...
</HEAD>
<BODY>
...
</BODY>
</HTML>
I usually just copy another web page and use it as a template.

Titles

Titles are important.
They help the web crawlers find and index you.
They give a name to your page.
They show up at the top of the browser.

The title goes within your head section. 

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Home Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
...
</BODY>
</HTML>

Hyperlinks

<A HREF="http://www.orbs.com/">A cool web page</A>

The "http:" stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

Beware! On the Internet, directory and filenames are case-sensitive.

Images

You can insert GIF or JPG images.
<IMG SRC="MyFace.gif">

You can wrap a hyperlink around an image.
<A HREF="http://www.orbs.com/"><IMG SRC="orbs.jpg"></A>

E-Mail

You can have people click on your e-mail address and send you a message.

<A HREF="mailto:croft@orbs.com">Send me feedback!</A>

Back

http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~croft/research/html/easy/
Copyleft 1997 David Wallace Croft
Posted 1997-10-08