Getting+Started

An HTML document is just a text document that has some special code in it and a suffix of "html" (or "htm") at the end of the filename. A browser will go on the internet and request a document, and then interpret all of that text to make a web page.

HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Lanugage" - it means that it does two things - it provides links to other locations on the web and describes how to layout documents on the page. It is mostly about the appearance of the web page, not so much about the meaning of what is found there.

The basic framework of an HTML document is the following: code format="html4strict" <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1- strict.dtd"> code The first line, which starts with "<!DOCTYPE" is a very long, complex line! It tells the browser which version of HTML to use, and where to go to find information about how to interpret it.

After that we have a tag called " " - this is a "starting" tag, and the corresponding "ending" tag is found at the end, " ." Note the slash mark in the ending tag - that's what makes it an ending tag. This means that all the stuff between the and the should be treated like HTML code.

Next we have a tag, ... this is information about the web page that doesn't get printed on the screen. There is another tag inside of this one, ... which will be used to title the window this web page shows up on.

The ... tag is the one that holds all the information that will appear on screen. If you put words in the middle of this area, you will see those words on the page when you load it in a browser.

To make things more interesting, you can fill in a bit of information in the and tag zones: code format="html4strict" <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1- strict.dtd"> My cool page Hello World! code

If you copy this into a text file, save that file as "greeting.html," and then open the file with a browser, you will see something like this.