Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
  3. Creating a Web Page
  4. HTML Elements Within the BODY element
  5. A Web Page example

Introduction

The growth of the Internet and the world wide web created a new medium of self expression. The personal webpage or homepage allows the individual to present himself/herself in text, graphics and even sounds to the world. Every subscriber to the Internet is given at least 1MB of disk space to develop his/her homepage.

Creating a homepage is almost as easy as using a word processor especially if you happen to use a HTML editor. Anyone who uses a word processing software knows that there are different document formats such as plain text (ASCII), rich text format (RTF), etc. The document format for the web page is the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

Hypertext Markup Language is not a programming language. It defines how a Hypertext document is to be displayed by the web browser. A Hypertext document is an ordinary text file (ASCII) document that has the capability to link keywords or sentences to other pieces of information on the same page or other documents which can be on another Internet site. This capability is known as the hyperlink feature of hypertext.

In addition to hypertext, HTML contains declarations that identify parts of the document which is to be displayed. The basic building blocks for the HTML comprises a set of document "tags" that determines the characteristics of the text that was created.

Like everything else, there must be a standard HTML specification for everyone to follow. At present, the standard is recognised to be the HTML 2.0 specification and the Internet committee is already working towards the 3.0 specifications.

Creating a Web Page

For the beginning, I have found that looking at how others present their web page a good inspiration. Check out the format and HTML tags that was used and how they appeared when displayed by the browser. If you are using Netscape Navigator, goto the View menu and select Source. You will be presented a screen full of text and HTML tags. You could save this file for further reference.

You will notice in every HTML document, there is a starting and ending tag similar to the following skeleton:

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN" >
< HTML >
< HEAD >
< TITLE > Put your title here < /TITLE >
< /HEAD >

< BODY >
. . The rest of the document body
. . < /BODY >
< /HTML >

Notice that HTML tags are enclosed in a pair of less than < and greater than > symbols. Also, the closing tags usually consists of a back slash / character.

The pair of <HTML> and </HTML> tags identifies the document as containing HTML elements. This should immediately follow the prologue document identifier and enclose the rest of the HTML text.

Immediately following the HTML tags, are the HEAD and TITLE tags. The HEAD contains information about the document. The most important being the title of the web page which is displayed at the top of the browser.

Following the HEAD and TITLE, the actual body of the HTML document which contains text and images is enclosed by the pairs of BODY tags.

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Presented by Dr Hum Tee Yeow at Hong Kah Ease CC on 15th June 1996
Last update 14 June 1996

Dr Hum Tee Yeow
tyhum@pacific.net.sg
URL:http://home.pacific.net.sg/~tyhum