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HTML - AN INTRODUCTION

HTML stands for HyperText Mark-up Language. Strictly speaking HTML is not a programming language but rather a system of tags that allow you to create web pages. HTML is the most basic component of web page design, a good understanding of how it works is essential for successful web based work. Because HTML is a system of text based tags you can create HTML pages with just a text editor. However, most people find the text based approach somewhat limiting and as such there is a whole range of visual page layout HTML programmes such as Dreamweaver available. While Dreamweaver allows you to create HTML based web pages with little or no knowledge of the code beneath a basic knowledge of html will always be useful in in solving problems that invariably arise.

<TAGS>

HTML is composed of tags that are used to delimit a particular area or property of a document. Tags typically appear as pairs such as:

<body>……….</body>

in this case the first tag <body> marks the start of the body section and the second tag </body> marks the end of the body section.

Almost all web pages will follow this very basic structure:

”

<html>

<head>

<title>put a title here</title>

</head>

<body>

within this section will lie the content of the web page

</body>

</html>

”

To display the above html code as a web page do the following:

1 copy the text into a text editing program

2 save as a plain text document with an extension of html. Eg test.html

3 open the document in a browser (file>open)

As you can see the page we have created is very plain in terms of both colour and layout. There are many tags that allow us to change the colour of the document itself and control the way text displays. HTML also allows images and other media (flash, video, sound etc) to be embedded.

OR IN DREAMWEAVER

(Ctrl+N) / > File > New

->Bland Page > HTML > Create

This will create a blank XHTML page with all the necessary tags to get going.