WWW

Doing it - how do I start?
HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) is very easy to learn. You can use an automatic HTML generation program, but to get the best out of your pages you do still need to know a little about how HTML works. The source code can be written using a straightforward text editor like Notepad, or converted from a Word document using Word97. To get some control of the code and to see what's happening, it is helpful to use a specific HTML editor. This also can save you a lot of typing.

Take a look at Dida, which is a simple and intuitive HTML editor at http://www.faico.net/dida/

Microsoft Frontpage is part of the Micorsoft Office suite and makes creating and uploading a website quick and simple. Knowlwdge of HTML is not necessarily required (but is still useful).

HTML works very simply. The information is imported into your web browser (eg Navigator or Internet Explorer) as a simple text file and it is the web browser that does all the work converting the information into the graphical display which you see in front of you. To do this it needs some directions from the author about how to lay the page out, and it gets these directions from tags which are defined between angled brackets.

For example:
<P> means "start a new paragraph"
<HR> means "draw a horizontal line across the page"

Some tags require a tag at each end of a section of text. This tells the web browser to work on the text between the two tags. The end tag has a "/" in the tag which says "end tag" to the web browser.

For example:
<B>Bold text</B> will create this: Bold text
or <I>some italic text</I> will create some italic text

Not difficult, is it? All you need to know now is what the commonly used tags are, and this is where your intuitive HTML editor will help you out. Menus and buttons will type in all the tags for you, so that you can concentrate on the information which you want to pass on.

If you would like some more detailed information about HTML, click here.

Click on the Hints button to continue...