═══ 1. Introduction ═══ Welcome to the World of HTML with Page V1.1 What is Page ? Page is a Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) editor for the production of World Wide Web (WWW) documents. It gives you full access to the text of a WWW document in textural form, which allows you to directly edit the text based 'Tags' which control the presentation of it. If you have never used Page before, then I think you will find that it is an easy to use, yet powerful companion as you develope and work on your web site. Page was developed as a result of deciding to move OS/2 Zone Magazine from paper, to the Internet. I looked around at a number of OS/2 based HTML editors and whilst I found some good ideas, I thought they they all lacked the features I needed to author a major web site. As they had all been written using Watcom's VX-REXX and I had extensive knownledge of both REXX and VX-REXX, I decided to write what became Page. The Essence of Page is Power Editing for beginners and experts. And keeping this in mind I arrived at two basic criteria I wanted to satisfy: ■ The program should be easy to use This means it should be as self explainitory as possible. Dialogs should be visually informative and easy to understand. An extensive toolbar should be present with icons on it that visually describe the function they represent. Complex tags structures should be hidden behind dialogs and simple menu instructions, and finally a Tag checker should be included so that new authors can check their documents for mistakes. ■ It should have plenty of power behind it This means that whilst the interface at first appears simple and almost beginner material, behind it should be a wealth of hot keys, bulk textural processing routines, drag and drop rich functionality, direct editing for fine tuning and anything else I can think of that power users are looking for. All this has been achieved and more. I hope you like the results. ═══ 2. Registering Page ═══ Page can be registered through any of the following companies for a small fee of $35 Americian. BMT Micro America 910-791-7052 voice America 910-350-2937 FAX finger tbrad@wilmington.net for PGP public key http://www.wilmington.net/bmtmicro ftp.wilmington.net/bmtmicro (Note: BMT's registrations will soon be available through a Australian mirror. ) Note: if anyone not in this list claims to handle registrations, please contact me to confirm that they are allowed to do so. Once you have registered, you will receive a userid and name which you can enter into the registration option of the help menu. This will then enable the crippled parts of Page and stop the nag screens from annoying you. ═══ 3. Page and Service packs ═══ IBM has released several service packs for OS/2. The current at the time of writing is service pack #22. From testing of various versions of Page under various service packs the following problems have been encountered. Please note that at this stage there is not much I can do about them as they are problems within the internal operation of VX-REXX. Prompts for information display a data entry field 1 pixels in height. This was first encountered by a beta tester who had fix pack 10 on system. It is known to IBM and Watcom and is being looked at. The only way around it is to avoid these dialogs by using hotkeys and other techniques, so that they are not required. Known Fixpack #17 problems. These include: Message dialogs not word wrapping or resizing to fit message. Various functionality not working. i.e. interactive windows such as the table editor, not changing it's display to reflect changes of parameteres. Caused by messages being lost. Z ordered not being changed. I.e. another application gets the focus but does not pop to the foreground. Some of the later fix packs have fixed some of the problems that the earlier ones caused, but the best way to handle them is to avoid them by not having a fix pack installed in the first place. Unfortuneately there is not a lot I can do at this stage about these bugs as they are internal to VX. I will have to wait for a couple of months to see what IBM and Watcom do. ═══ 4. Page and OS/2 Warp V4.0 ( Code named Merlin ) ═══ I have just tested Page under the final release of Merlin and everything appears to be working fine. All of the bugs I had encountered under the fix packs and beta have been fixed. ═══ 5. A brief intro to HTML and Web Authoring ═══ Documents on the World Wide Web come in many flavours from the straight laced simple text types, to the highly complex and colourful. Whether a single Home Page, a Fans site for a movie, an on-line shopping mall, or a full fledged magazine such as OS/2 Zone, they are all based around the same thing, Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) files. These files are relatively simple text based files. Each file represents one page and consists of two distinct things. Firstly, the text that you want to have displayed on the page, and second, special code words or 'HTML Tags' which tell the Web Browsers how to process these files to achieve the resulting page in your browser. As a budding WWW author, your job is to break your document up into one file per page and then to add these special Tags to create the 'Look' you want for your Web Site. This is where Page comes in. Using a combination of Page and the Web Explorer, you can create and test your whole Web Site on your own hard drive. Then you can upload the HTML files to you Web Server via an File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program and the job is done. Obviously there is a little more to it than this, I have made no mention of such things as interfacing to programs running on your server, security, upload programs and protocols, etc. But these are all things that you will need to work out with the person or company providing your Web Server, and therefore go a bit beyond the scope of this manual. The aim here is to teach you how to use Page and perhaps a little HTML along the way. Obviously, for more detailed HTML references you should buy an appropriate book or download a reference file. To develope a Web page, the basic sequence of events goes like this: 1. Create a new file with a HTM or HTML extension on your hard drive and load it into Page. 2. Either type in, paste or drag and drop to create the text of your document. 3. Add in the appropriate tags so the when the file is loaded into a Web Browser it has the look you are after. 4. Test the document in a Web Browser. This is a simple matter of dragging from Page's main editing screen to the Web Explorer and dropping. The Web Explorer will then load up the document so that you can see how it looks. 5. Repeat the last two steps until the page looks right, then save it to your hard drive. This is the simple way of doing things. Another for example, is to use templates which are default HTML pages and then add in the text of the document. But for now this will do, so lets continue on and have a closer look at tags and how they do their magic. ═══ 5.1. What is HTML ? ═══ HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and refers to the Tags which control the functionality and look of a Web Page. By using HTML tags you can do such things as: Specify where paragraphs are to occur. Format text using Bold, Italic, Underline and other formatting controls to enhance the readability of the text. Include horizontal lines and graphic images. Link to other web sites, documents and pages. Auto down load files. Specify text colours, background colours, background images, etc. Display tables of information. Interact with databases. And many other things as well. HTML tags follows a very simple formulea. They start with a less than character ("<"), followed by the tag name, any parameters that the tag may have, and finally end with a closing greater than character (">"). For example,
is a tag which defines the start of a new paragraph, where as
tells the browser that the bitmap stored in the file
"./bitmap.gif" is to be displayed at this point in the document.
Most HTML tags require a corresponding end tag so that the browser knows when
to stop applying whatever the tag has told it to do. For example, the
following text and tags:
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │
│This is a test using Derek's Kool Program c│
│ │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Turns out like this in your Web Browser:-
This is a test using Derek's Kool Program called Page.
The tells the browser that all text after it is to be Italic and the
tells it to stop applying the Italic formatting. These end tags are defined by
using the tag's Name with a forward slash in front of it. I.e. , ,