Essentials

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What is HTML? Remember Word Perfect for dos? You do, good. Remember how, when you wanted to make a word bold, you had to put in special codes before the word to switch bold on, and after to switch it off again. You do, well, it's the same with HTML. The only difference is, you use what are known as tags. You can write it in any old word processor, so long as it can save it as a txt file.

You can use Notepad, Write, Edit, Word for Windows, in fact, anything that can save an ASCII text file. Be careful of some, they might try and convert special characters into something that wont work. But that's the hard way, check out the Resources for some HTML editors to automate things for you.

Tags Tags. Well, tags are very important to the way your page looks. First you need to know the tags that you have to have in an HTML document. These are

<HTML>
<BODY>

<HTML> tells the browser that this is a web page, and <BODY> tells it that the main body of the page is about to start. It's important to note that most tags need switching off, usually you just add in a /. So the most basic HTML document you can get would look like :

<HTML>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>

But of course, this is a bot pointless. Note the way they are also turned off in reverse order to that which they were turned on.

Basic Tags Ok. Now we're ready to start making a web page. The first tag we'll learn about is the <TITLE> tag. This sets the message that appears in the blue window bar at the top of the window, and the text that appears when you bookmark a page. You can see this one says "HTML Guide - Essentials".

Here's how we do it :

<TITLE>HTML Guide - Essentials</TITLE>

You would place this between the <HTML> tag and the <BODY> tags, so your basic page would look like :

<HTML>
<TITLE>HTML Guide - Essentials</TITLE>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Next Right that's the Essentials over with, it's time to move on. To see the HTML of any of these pages, go to the file menu, select "Save As..." and save the document. Then open it into your favourite text editor. I would recommend you use notepad for now, other text editors can have trouble displaying the special characters.