Most of the content (including this document) that you read on the web is
written using HTML. HTML stands for hypertext markup language. HTML
documents are just plain text files with codes, or tags, that specify how
a document is to be formatted. All HTML documents have certain things in
common and some of the tags will be presented here. Tags are always easy
to identify because they are enclosed in angle brackets (<
>). Tags are not case sensitive (<CODE>
is the same as <code>). Some tags are said to be
paired. That is to say they have an opening and a closing tag, where the
closing tag has a forward slash in it (/).
The Bare Minimum
The following are a list of tags that pretty much all HTML documents
contain:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>
<HTML>, <HEAD>, and <BODY>
The entire HTML document must be enclosed in <HTML>
tags. The document is divided into two sections, the header and the body.
These two sections are enclosed in <HEAD> and
<BODY> tags respectively. The head contains
information about the document and the body is the content of the document
or the text you see in your browser.
The <BODY> tag also has attributes that you can set to
determine the appearance of the document. The following are the most common
attributes used in the <BODY> tag:
BGCOLOR="color"
LINK="color"
TEXT="color"
VLINK="color"
BGCOLOR specifies the background color and TEXT
specifies the color of text in the document. LINK is the color
of the unvisited links and VLINK is the color of the visited
links. "color" specifies a color and is usually represented
by an RGB value, which takes the form of a pound sign (#)
followed by 6 hexadecimal digits, 2 for the intensity of red, 2 for green,
and finally 2 for blue. So, for example, the color blue would be
represented as "#0000FF", while the color yellow would be "#FFFF00". If you
wanted to have a white background with red text, use the following:
<BODY BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF" TEXT="#FF0000">
<TITLE>
The <TITLE> tag contains the title of document. The
title usually appears somewhere at the top of your browsers window. For
example, the title of this document is "Introduction to HTML," which is
produced by the following code in the header section:
<TITLE>Introduction to HTML</TITLE>
<P>
The most common tag in the body section is the paragraph
(<P>) tag. These tags do not have to be paired, but
pairing them is often useful to help you to see where each paragraph starts
and ends.
<A HREF="url">
This tag is called an anchor and is used to create links to another
document. "url" refers to the address of the document to which the link
refers. This is what is usually displayed in the address bar of your
browser. If you wanted to create a link the this department's web page, use
the following:
<A HREF="http://www.ele.uri.edu/">URI Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering</a>
This will be displayed as:
URI Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
<IMG SRC="url">
This tag lets you insert images into you web page. url is the
address of the image you want to insert. You should also specify the
width and height of the image, in pixels, using WIDTH= and
HEIGHT=, respectively. It is also a good idea to specify
a description for the image, using ALT=, in case the user does
not have the capability to view pictures, or doesn't want to wait for the
picture to download. Conisder an image in the same directory as your
document that you want to include in your web page. The image is called
sky.gif and is 42 pixels wide and 30 pixels high. You could
use the following tag:
<IMG SRC="sky.gif" HEIGHT="30" WIDTH="42" ALT="a blue sky">
Where to go from here
There is a lot more to learn about HTML. One way to learn is to look at
other web pages for examples. Most web browsers offer the option to view
the source of a web page. This will show you the HTML behind what you are
seeing in the browser.
|
