Quick Tutorial - Your first homepage

Starting a new HTML document

Start up Anansi and select File| New Project File from the pull-down menu. A new and blank window appears.
To add the basic structure to the document, select Assistants| Basic Structure. The cursor should appear between the title tags.

<HTML> <HEAD><TITLE>My first homepage</TITLE></HEAD> <BODY> Everything except the title goes here. </BODY> </HTML>
Now you can type the title of this document. The title should be chosen with care, as it will be used for bookmarking by visitors of your homepage. The title will also appear in the caption of your browser when it loads the document. If you have your browser installed, you can check this by selecting File| Test. You'll need to give the filename when you haven't saved already.
Everything else you want to add, needs to go between the body tags.

Remember, have the cursor placed somewhere between the body tags. To begin you might like to start with a heading. Suppose you want to use H1 then click the H1 button and type the text for the header between the H1 tags.
After typing some text, you may want to start a new paragraph. Press the paragraph button to insert a single <p> tag to indicate you want to skip a line.
If you prefer starting a new line without skipping one, you should use the Line Break tag, which you can find immediatly left from the paragraph button.

... <BODY> <H1>Welcome to my homepage!</H1> Contrary to what you see in Anansi, Netscape or other browsers don't care about normal line breaks. Use the paragraph tag to skip a line. <p> ...
Finally you might like to add a graphic. To insert a graphic click the button with the mountain and blue sky. A standard Windows filedialog will appear. After you've made your choice, the cursor will return to the Alternative Text attribute. Don't forget to type something there for the many people that use a text-only mode to visit your homepage. The Height and Width attributes you see when it's a gif file, will help some browsers to speed up their display while loading your document.
By the way, browsers only support gif and jpg files. If you have graphics in another format I advise you to use a third party graphics application to convert them to gif or jpeg. Use gif for textbanners and screencaptures, use jpg for photo's.

The Document Assistant will help you set your own color settings for the document. Select Assistans| Document Colors. A sort of wysiwyg window will appear. Don't be frightened by the Red, Green and Blue editboxes, they're only meant for fine-tuning. Press the Chart button to get a chart of all the colors you can dream of.

Don't be frightened by the <FONT color="#ff0000">Red</FONT>, <FONT color="#00ff00">Green</FONT> and <FONT color="#0000ff">Blue</FONT> editboxes
The same thing can be done with selected pieces of text. You select text by holding the left mouce button down and then drag it. After you selected the text you want to color, choose Assistants| Font Color.

The easiest way to make a link is available when you have Netscape up and running. When you press the right mouse button Anansi and then select the Get URL item, a link to the currently showing page will be added. It's like pressing the Add Bookmark item in Netscape.
Just as easy but only if you're running Anansi under Windows 95: you can drop Internet Shortcuts. If you don't know what they are, try making one by pressing the right mouse button in your browser's window. This is the easiest to do with Netscape.
And now linking the hard way. You can also add a link by filling in the URL tag yourself. Press the button with the chain. Normally you will get the URL Dialog, where you only need to fill in the required fields. What will appear if you've got the URL Dialog disabled is:

The cursor will appear between the tags. This is where the description of the link has to go. The actual adress of the link has to go between the quotes of the HREF attribute. A link to Anansi's homepage will look like:
Last but not least, linking to one of your own pages can be done without the http://server.address.stuff. You can use so called relative linking instead. If you're keeping all your files in the same directory - as the manual files of Anansi are - a link to a document called manual.htm is made by: