Title

Written by: Alex Blaine Edited by: ZiffDuck So you wanna learn HTML, do ya? I will teach you everything you need to know to get a page up on the internet along with the basic text manipulation tags in HTML. Later, I will teach you the more advanced features of HTML. Just as a note, HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. First, what are tags? If you have ever looked at the source of an HTML document, you would have seen a lot of things like
. This is what we call a tag. Tags ALWAYS start with a "<" and end with a ">". These tell the browser that what is in between these two signs (< and >) is a tag and not just plain text. In other words, it says "Hey, don't really display this, but use it to format the final outcome of my page." Well, it doesn't really say this, but that is the essence of it. Some tags have both a starting and an ending tag while others just have a starting tag. Ending tags always start with "" with the same text in between the two that the starting tag has (ex. would be the closing tag for and would be the ending tag for , ex.2--If you typed HTML is awesome, HTML is awesome would become bold.) When I introduce tags that have ending tags, I will call them "" so you will know if they have an ending tag or not. Tags can also have attributes. If it does, the attributes will go in the beginning tag (ex. - would be the actual tag, and SRC would be an attribute of it.) Some tags might have many attributes, and some might not have any. If the tag has an attribute and you don't add it, it will leave it at the default. Just as a(nother) note, I use all caps in my tags just as good form and ease of distinguishing it from normal text. Tags can be in all lower case, as in "
" or in random case, as in "
." There are a lot of tags, but we will only mention a few in this issue. Now, to start our first HTML page... Most HTML pages have the framework as follows: Title Now, here's an in-depth look at what's going on here: The tells the browser where the start and stop of the HTML document is. To use HTML tags, these must be here. The tags hold the tags that go in the the head section of the document (hence the name of the tag.) In this, we see the Title tags (the title of this page will be "Title") (note: no quotation marks are required between tags), but there are other tags that go in the head section of the page. Inside the tags is where all the action goes on--where you will do all of your page formatting. Now that you have the framework down, let's start with the real stuff. Something I need to tell you is that White Space (returns, spaces [more than one], tabs, etc...) does not matter. I could have written the framework as: Title I would have gotten the same effect as the other one, but it wouldn't be very easy to read. (There is an exception to this--the
tags, which we will talk about later) Now, lets go head-first into the good stuff. There are many formatting tags which will be explained to you here. To simulate a carriage return (in C or C++ it is \n), you would insert the
tag. That stands for "Line Break." The
tag signals a new paragraph. It inserts a line break along with some vertical space. If you need two (or more) spaces in a row, you would type . This is more of an escape sequence than a tag, but since we were on the topic of formatting, I thought I would throw it in. If you have an unreasonable number of spaces (like 15), you might want to use the
tags. You would put 15 spaces in between the two tags. It would save time, space, and your fingers for that matter. Text manipulating will be the next subject that I cover here. There are many tags to change the way text looks. To make it bold, you would use the tags. Italics would be indicated by the tags. Underlined text would be the tags. The tags would make strike-through text. If you wanted your page to show an actual HTML tag (like you wanted "" to appear in the middle of the page), you would use the tags. Be sure to close this, because if you don't, it will be the last tag that the browser recognizes on that page. would make the text appear in a "Typewriter" font. The tags are used to give text Emphasis. To make the text a size larger, you would use the tags, where as if you wanted to make it smaller, you would use the tags. To make some text have the maximum emphasis, you would use the tags. tags make the enclosed text subscripted. The tags make it superscripted. To indicate a distinctive citation, you would use the tags. If you had a defined term, they might be marked by the tags. Sample in-line text would be inside the tags. The last tag that will be shown today is the tags. They render text in a fixed width font. You can experiment with these different tags on your own and create different outcomes. Before your next lesson, I would suggest using these for fun to gain a better understanding of them. You can just create a plain text document called "something.html" and open it in your browser to see how it turned out. If you make a change to your document source, just save the changes and click reload in your browser window. Well, until next time, have fun with what I have taught you today. For a general overview of HTML, go to: http://www.geocities.com/athens/2040 and use what you have learned there. I will eventually cover all of the topics you see there, but when it fits in.