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Exploring the World-Wide Web

Hypertext Markup Language


Creating web documents with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) may sound high-tech, but actually anyone who can use word processing software can learn to put together simple HTML pages. One of the reasons for the fantastic popularity of the World-Wide Web is that it allows individuals and organizations to publish and distribute their information far more cheaply and easily than conventional printing technologies.

"Exploring the World-Wide Web" is not an HTML tutorial, but there are many good ones available, including Case Western Reserve University's Introduction to HTML (http://www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html).

For an overview of web site design, a good place to start is the WWW Style Guide at the Yale School of Medicine's Center for Advance Instructional Media (http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html). This guide will help you design a web site and web pages that are easy to use and that communicate clearly. A similar and equally valuable resource is Sun Microsystem's Guide to Web Style. The Bandwidth Conservation Society (http://www.infohiway.com/faster/index.html) provides advice on how to prepare bandwidth-efficient web graphics with Photoshop and other image-editing programs.

For more detailed information about HTML, here are some other resources:

Below are examples of many of the most useful HTML tags. It's easy to copy these for your own documents. As an exercise, you can retrieve the "Source" for this page (for example, by choosing "Document Source" in Netscape Navigator's "View" menu) and then use your mouse to select tags, copy them, and paste them into your document. Comparing an HTML document and the same page displayed by a browser is the best way to start learning HTML.

An example "skeleton" HTML document

<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Your Document's Title</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1>Your Document's Title</H1> First paragraph of text here.<P> Second paragraph.<P> Etc.<P> </BODY> </HTML>

Headers

Least Prominent Header
Level 5 Header

Level 4 Header

Level 3 Header

Level 2 Header

Most Prominent Header

Styles

Boldface
Italics

List Formats

Bulleted List

Ordered List

  1. Item
  2. Item
  3. Item

Definition List

Term to be defined
This might be some rather verbose text elaborating on the term or heading given above ... notice how the definition is indented. This format has many uses.
Another term to be defined
Obviously, subsequent terms and definitions are displayed the same way.

Images

Wayne Van Horne demonstrates shuto uke kokutsu dachi

Hypertext Links

Here's a link to the UGA web server.

You can create links within a document, too. This sentence contains a target for such an internal link.

Here is the link to the target.

Miscellaneous Tags

Paragraph

Here's a paragraph.

Here's another.

Line Break

Here's one line.
Here's another.

Horizontal Rule

Thanks for participating in "Exploring the World-Wide Web"! These web pages are revised and updated regularly, so you may want to visit them again later.

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Last revised: Wed, Feb 24, 1999, 1:37:48 PM

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