Beginner's HTML tutorial

So you wanna be a web superstar?

Well, you've come to the right place. In the next couple of lessons I will be introducing topics, techniques, and terminology about web publishing. I will also give you real world examples of how to apply the things that you learn.
This short HTML tutorial will assume that you know nothing of the web...that you don't know the concept of how a web page works. Even if you've picked up the basics elsewhere, it won't hurt to read on. I figure you can never have enough web philosophy. I always tend to go to webmonkey and read up on stuff, even if I already know it. The reason for this is that the more you read up on it, the more likely you'll be able to come up with a solution when a problem is presented to you.

So without further Adue (that's probably spelled wrong), click HERE to continue

In the first lesson, I'll be taking up the basics of HTML such as what it can and can't do, and some very basic tags.

If you didn't know already, HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. what HTML handles is the formatting of the document. Any and all text in the source is handled in a linear manner...meaning that in the source, you can have all the whitespace you want between words/letters, and the final result will be right next to each other. That is where HTML tags come in.

Every HTML tag produces some kind of effect on the text that follows it. Most every tag that you're gonna use will be accompanied by a closing tag (which can be identified with the "/" forward slash before the letters).
for example:

HELLO you sly dog

would produce the following result:

HELLO you sly dog

As you noticed, the text that was surrounded by the Bold tags [..] showed up bold in the final output.
This is the case with the most basic tags such as Italics [..], and underline [..] tags. There are of course a couple of other basic tags such as these, but we'll get into those later.

Now that you understand the concept of a tag, I'll introduce you to the basic structure of HTML source code. In case you don't know what I'm talking about when I say "Source code", this is what you are actually gonna be typing into a text editor such as Notepad, or simple text and saving with a .html extension. Once you save this file...the easiest way to access it is by opening up your default browser (IExplorer, or Netscape) and going to File...open and browsing to the file. Once you do this the browser will interpret the HTML and spit out the results.
A basic HTML document will be contained within <html> tags...an opening tag and a closing tag (</html>). Within those tags are two more sets of tags...the <head> tags, and the <body> tags. the <head> tag will contain stuff about the document that isn't displayed to the user...such as the <title> tag, which dictates what is displayed in the title bar of the browser window, and other things which we'll discuss later.

with the <body> tag I'm gonna introduce a new concept in tags...the Parameter. Parameters are basically name=value pairs that are included in the first tag to change certain aspects of the tag. The <body> tag has several parameters...this is what a basic body tag will look like:

<body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="blue">

As I'm sure you could figure out, the other parameters were bgcolor, text, and link. These set the color aspects of the <body> tag (which is where all content is stored). Are these all the parameters available...No. Are parameters required...No.
All parameters are going to have default values...the values that I put to the body tag up there are in fact the default, so technically I can leave those out...but you should never assume anything because the user can easily change these default values with browser preferences.

So without further Adue...here is a basic HTML page layout:

<html>
<head>
<title>this is the title</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="blue">
This is the text that will show up in the document
</body>
</html>

In the next lesson, I'll be talking about the more advanced features of HTML such as tables and layers. so
Click here When ready.

So you've got a basic page layout done...and you've written some text and added some flair with tags like the bold tags and such...and you're wondering, "how do I skip a line or layout the text differently?"
Well there are many many different ways of doing this. the main methods that I use to format text are:

Tables
Layers
Blockquotes

Probably the most important tag that you are ever going to use is the <table> tag. This is the tag that I'm going to go into the most detail with because it's the easiest to format text and pictures.

Let me clear one thing up before we continue. I know that the next question out of your mouths is gonna be "How do I put pictures on the web?"...my answer to this is "Not yet"...I don't want you to get into the habit that a lot of web designers

JDM.4MG.COM