Basic HTML

Here's a series of basic HTML tutorials providing an introduction to the fundamentals of writing and assembling HTML codes in order to create your own web pages. These tutorials are short, concise, go easy on the technobabble and by going through them you can expect to learn details about:

Basic HTML Necessities

To create a web page, you won't need any kind of special web authoring software nor will you need to be hooked up to the internet.

What you will need, however, is the following:

A basic text editor. A text editor differs from a word processor (like WordPad) in that it saves text to a file completely stripped of any formatting (such as italics, bold, fonts, and colors, etcetera. A method of saving text to a file so that it only contains the text and nothing else is essential to create a web page. Remember that web pages are text files which apply all the formatting using HTML coding. All Windows operating systems contain a text editor by default called 'Notepad'. If you're on a Mac then you can use SimpleText.
A means to save files...

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How to Make a Web Page

Here's how to make a web page using just Windows Notepad (or any old text editor for that matter).

Open Windows Notepad.
Type in the the words "Hello World!" (without the quotation marks).
Save the text file with an .htm extension.
Locate where you saved your .htm file and double-click on it.

Presto. One web page.

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How to Edit a Web Page

So assuming that you've just gone through the previous tutorial on how to make a web page, basically what you will do is edit your web page by adding HTML code and your own content to mypage.htm using Notepad (or any decent text editor). Then you will save your work by simply clicking on File » Save and then —keeping Notepad still open— switch your screen to Internet Explorer and click on Refresh to preview your latest changes. Then, keeping Internet Explorer still open, switch your screen back to Notepad again, do some more editing, save your work, switch back to Internet Explorer, click Refresh, preview, etcetera.

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The Basics of HTML Tags

The source code of a web page is constructed using a series of standardized keywords and abbreviations known as HyperText Markup Language or, more commonly, HTML.

HTML is a publishing language that all computers may potentially understand and immediately interpret as the initialising and formatting instructions of a web page. Each keyword or abbreviation in HTML is known as an 'element' and each HTML element is enclosed in angle brackets like this... < > This 'angle bracket/ HTML element' assembly is known as a 'tag' and all HTML elements have at least a start tag and a majority of them also have an end tag.

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Basic HTML Web Page Structure

A web page constructed using HTML has an essential structure. The page always begins with the start tag of the html element and always terminates with the end tag of the html element as follows:

Example 1

<html>



...web page...



</html>

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The Basics of HTML Attributes

Now that you're familiar with how to make a web page and the essential structure of a web page using HTML elements, you will need to become familiar with another type of coded instruction that accompanies HTML elements known as attributes. To serve as an example we will use the font element which is used to set the text on your web page into different typefaces, sizes and colors.

First let's see the <font>...</font> tags in action...

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