A little bit about HTML (hypertext markup language)

HTML can be pretty ugly - it is definitely NOT WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). It may be the "revenge of the computer nerds" because it is like Word Processors were like in the 1970's and 1980's, but was created later when people should have known better. However, the first thing to know is that you probably don't have to know a lot about HTML. I know very little, even though a fair number of my pages are "pure HTML".

If you want to see the HTML behind a page, you can select View>Source. This page is written with very simple HTML. There is text and some HTML "tags". All tags start with a less than symbol and end with a greater than symbol. Many tags are used in pairs in which the ending tag has a slash "/" before the (identical) tag contents. For instance the page begins with a "< html >" tag and ends with a "< /html >" tag.

In most pages, there is a HEAD section, which does not show on the page, and a BODY section, which does. The HEAD section includes a TITLE, which shows up on the blue title bar of the window. Some people try to mess with search engines by putting a lot of frequently searched-on words in their header in order to increase the chances of their page being found.

Headings

Headings can be created to create emphasis. H1 is a top level heading. Other headings down to H6 can be created.

Paragraphs

Paragraph tags ARE NOT paired. A single P tag creates a new paragraph.

Basic Formatting

Simple Bolds , Italics , and Underlines ARE paired, and can be done with B, I, and U tag pairs. I strongly discourage using underlining, since readers are used to underlines being links.

Alignment can be handled using LEFT, CENTER, and RIGHT paired tags.

This is left aligned

This is supposed to be right aligned.

This is centered

Lists

Lists can be either Unordered lists are surrounded with UL tag pairs, while ordered lists are surrounded with OL tag pairs. Each has list items indicated with a LI tag. We seem to be able to get away with skipping the end tag for the items.

We might specify other web page addresses (URLs - Uniform Resource Locators) for

  1. Hyperlinks
  2. Inline images

Horizontal Rule

You can draw a horizontal line across a page using the HR tag (it is NOT paired)

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks start with an A tag and end with the corresponding end A tag, however, the page to be linked to has to be specified with a HREF = theURL in quotes. For example: My page for CSC 152

This is a little hairy. Usually I create a link by copying another link and changing the contents. You guys would probably just create the link in Word or Frontpage and the HTML would be generated for you. Note that the HREF is a keyword . Keywords are followed by an equal sign, then a value.

Inline Images

An image can be included directly in a page using the IMG tag. The source of the image has to be specified with another keyword - SRC = theURL in quotes. For example a beautiful picture from Norway:

No end tag is needed. Here, I've included other keywords (HEIGHT and WIDTH) to keep the picture size reasonable for most viewers. Be sure not to distort the picture with the height and width:

Without the sizes at all, since this was a 3 megapixel picture, it would be big; the result would be like:

Last Updated on 3/8/2006 by Professor Michael Redmond, La Salle University