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CHAPTER 2. HTML

There are 90 different standard tag names, but we will only discuss the most

common of these.

Thus a web page consists of an html element that contains a head and body

element. The head element in turn contains a title element.

For example, the following text defines a simple  Hello World  webpage

Hello World

If you put this in a file called first.html and then view the webpage with

your browser (using the Open... menu item). You will see a simple web page

consisting only of the words  Hello World  whose title bar contains the phrase

 My first web page.  If you bookmark this page, then the title  My first web

page  is what will appear in the bookmark.

Exercise 1 Creating your first web page. Use your favorite editor to create

a file containing the  Hello World  web page shown above. Store your file as

 text  with the name  first.html  on your disk. You can view your page by

starting up a browser (e.g. Netscape, Internet Explorer, Amaya, Opera, etc.)

and selecting  Open File  from the  File  menu. Select the  first.html  file that

you just created and you should see a simple page with the words  Hello World 

in black on a white or gray background. Beware: this simple exercise has many

pitfalls and it may take you a while to complete it. This is the kind of task

that is best done with someone helping you in person as the details vary from

computer to computer. Some of the problems that may arise are:

  Some operating systems hide the extensions (.html, .txt, .jpg, .mov) that

specify what type of data is in the file. These operating systems also will

automatically add extensions (e.g. .txt) to files. So you may think you

have a file named  first.html  when it is actually called  first.html.txt 

Ouch!

  You may have difficulty saving the file as text. Many word processors

store the document you create with a lot of extra information besides the

characters that you have typed. For example, they might store the font you

have used and the margins and tab setting, etc. The  first.html  file needs

to be stored in a simpler format which contains only the characters you

typed. This is called  text format  and is usually listed as a choice on the

 save as  window.