Creating Web Pages
If there's one thing you need to
remember about web-page creation...
What Are Web Pages?
"Page" is an odd name for what you're looking at. This web page,
for example, is at least several screens long. Other web pages are
only a few lines long. Somebody probably knows why they are known
as pages, and that somebody probably has a degree in computer
science.
Web pages are text files (ASCII) that include words and hyperlinks.
The links can be references to other sections of the same document, which help the reader
navigate through complex pages.
They can be references to other web pages near and far. They can be
references to images, or to sound and video files.
I'm not going to link to any sound or video files because they take
a long time to load, especially through a dial-up connection, and you often need other programs
to enable you to
hear the sound or see the video.
HTML--Hypertext Markup Language
HTML is the markup, or coding, language used in web pages. It
enables you to control the presentation of information on a
computer screen--to a degree. The coding is embedded in pairs of
angle-bracketed "tags."
To make text appear as a headline, you need a beginning tag and
an ending tag.
Here's a headline in H4, the fourth-largest
size
Some tags are simple; some are more complex. One of the
best ways to learn about HTML coding is to examine the text files
that are used to create web pages. When you find a web page with a
design feature that you'd like to know how to use, go to the
VIEW menu (In Netscape) and hit SOURCE. This shows
you the text version of the web page. Try it if you want to see how
the headline is coded.
Go back to the Web Pages section
The Zen of HTML
HTML is a good-news/bad-news thing. The bad news is that HTML is
crude and cumbersome compared with many composition coding systems
used in print typesetting. It doesn't come anywhere near the design
capabilities of a Quark Xpress. And, although web
pages can be very long and elaborate, presentation is still
effectively limited by the size of the viewing area on computer
screens, which can be very different from computer to computer. A
web page can go on forever, but you still can only see one screen
at a time.
The good news is that HTML is a web standard. It enables anybody
with a web browser to display the same page on the screen--sort of.
Another good thing is that HTML is undergoing rapid improvement,
though some improvements are more equal than others, to steal a
phrase.
The crazy thing is that you can't be sure
your document will look the same on different browsers, such as
Netscape or Internet Explorer, or even on different versions of the same
browser. In the olden days, say five years ago, one page might look like this in one version of a browser. It might have looked somewhat different when viewed by another browser. The good news is that now most HTML codes (or tags) are interpreted similarly by the two browsers that most people use, Internet Explorer and Netscape, but there still are some infuriating differences that still require web page writers to check their pages in more than one browser. The bottom line is that as far as HTML goes, the only constant is change.
Coding Web Pages
You can code HTML by hand, that is, type the angle-bracketed tags
and links into a word processor document and save the document as
ASCII, or plain text files. You can look at a web page that shows
some simple features of HTML. You can "publish"
your own web pages by placing them in a directory under your
university account and making them accessible to others. The Computing Center has a one-page
handout explaining how.
Go back to the home page
