Learn HTML : Getting started Part 1

Thursday, February 5th, 2009 | Learn HTML

Over the next coming weeks and months we are going to produce some articles on HTML and how you use it with Dimensions. These articles will be aimed , to start with , at users that don’t have any or very little experience in writing HTML pages. If you did not know by now, this is a big part in any survey that you do. So what does HTML stand for and what can it do for you. Click more to find out.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is the document formatting language used to create pages on the World Wide Web. HTML is used to describe how pages of text, graphics, and other information are organized, formatted and linked together, and it is used by all web browsers in determining how to display a web page. HTML files are plain text files (ASCII) with special tags in them. Tags are special words that wrap around various content and tell the browser how to interpret it and display it on the computer screen.

So how do these tags work and what do they look like. HTML tags normally come in pairs like < > and </ > for example to make something bold you would use <b>Hello world</b>.
< > are opening tag which Indicate where a piece of text begins
</ > are closing tag which Indicate where the piece of text ends

When we create an HTML page we need to make sure that we have minimum number of required tags in our file. There are four of them and they are,

<html></html>	Specifies that this is an HTML document. All html documents begin and end with this tag. (The file extension .html also indicates that as well)
<head></head>	Creates a container for meta information, such as the document’s title, keywords and description info for search engine crawling, etc to be added to the document (This information is not displayed on the page). The head element contains the title.
<title></title>	Creates a “title” for the document. Anything you add inside this tag, the browser displays it in the title bar of the browser window.
<body></body>	Creates a container for the document’s content (text, images etc). This is where all the “viewable” content will be inserted.

So now that we know all this, we should put this to practice. Lets create our first web page. Some of you will say, why don’t we use front page or expression web and the truth is , you could but when you look at the html, will you actually understand it ? These tools often put lots more code into the document than you need and we need to make sure what we put in , will be excepted by Dimensions. So , open up note pad and create a “.html” file and type in the following.

<head>
     <title>First Page</title>
</head>
     <body>
     Hello World
     </body>
</html>

Once you have typed all this in , save the file to your hard disk and double click on it. What you should see is something like the following.

My First HTML Page

Notice where the words “First Page” are, they are in the browser Title bar. Also notice the Address of the web page. You can see that the address bar reads the location as to where you saved the file. Now this is ok for what we are doing today, but in the future we may need to run this from our browser with the address bar reading something like “http://localhost/MySite/MyFirstPage.html” if we access our pages this way, then they are being accessed the way they would be on the Internet and any javascript or code that we had in them would run correctly. In our next article we will tell you all about IIS and how to set it up to run your pages correctly.