Intro & Getting Started | Viewing Source & Tags | Making & Testing a Page | Basic Text Formatting | Images
Links | Directory Structure & e-mail | Tables | META Tags | Outside Resources

Viewing the Source:
One the most helpful things potential HTML writers say to do is to simply look at the source code of other web pages. This allows you to get some kind of idea of how the final coding should appear, how tags interact with each other, etc. To do this in Internet Explorer and Netscape, click the "View" menu, and select "Source" (or "Document Source"). The page's source should open up in Notepad or a new browser window.

At first, the code will look incomprehensible. But as you begin to learn HTML, the code will begin to make more and more sense. Like any language, you increase your literacy by reading.

Tags Primer:
HTML is a very basic language to learn; in fact it's not even really a computer language! Nothing needs to be "compiled" by another program to then be used; once it's saved, it's ready. The majority of coding resembles natural spoken English. To format your page, "tags" are used at the beginning of a section and end of a section (opening and closing tags, respectively). This indicates to the browser where to begin and end a certain kind of formatting.

Since HTML is text-only, you must, in the coding, tell the browser to bold, italicize, or underline text; there is no "bold" button to click. You need to "command," in a sense, the browser to start the bold format, and then to end it at some point; you would put an opening bold tag at the beginning of a word, and a closing bold tag at the end of a word, for example.

Tags are identified by the "less-than" and "greater-than" signs (< and >). An opening tag always has "<" and ">" and a closing tag always has "</" and ">" (yes, the slash is needed). The tags will not show up on the page when a browser views them; they are there in the background for the browser to interpret. It is good common practice to use capital letters for your tags (for example, "<B>" and "</B>" for bold tags). This will help you quickly identify where tags are when viewing your source code.

It's possible to have text with no tags formatting them; however, the text will appear in "default font" of the browser. This is bad practice, as you want your page to look as similar as possible across multiple platforms and browsers.

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