Section 40. About Netscape Composer | Sams Teach Yourself Creating Web Pages All in One

40. About Netscape Composer

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

6 About Proper HTML Coding

Now that you have Netscape installed, you can access Composer and get an idea of what you can do with it.

Composer is designed to look and work as much like a word processor as possible, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get around.

At the top of the window is a row of icons to perform file actions, such as opening, closing, printing, and saving files. Next to the file actions are wizards to add links, images, and tables to the page, and to spell check the document.

Below the file actions are buttons to apply formatting to the text and images, such as alignment, color , and type size .

At the bottom of the window below the main work area are tabs that move from one view to another of the page. The normal mode is where you are going to do most of your work, the HTML Tags mode shows your page with the structure of the tags that make up HTML, the <HTML> Source view shows the code on the page, and the Preview mode shows how the page is going to look in the browser.

To help you get used to the different features, add some text to the page. You need to have a little content for some of the features to show up.

When you click on the HTML Tag view , the view changes to show your text wrapped in yellow HTML tag markers. On this page, because you haven't added any format to the text, all you see is the Body tag. You can view the page later and see more detail here. You also can work in this view to add content and the tags will change to match what you have done.

If you add anything that requires a new tag, you can double click on the tag marker and you can change the attributes of the tag in the Advanced Property Editor.

When you click on the <HTML> Source view , it shows you the actual HTML coding of the page. In this case, Composer is going to add some code that you might not recognize called the DocType and the <meta content> tag. These tags are important for code to be valid, but for now you don't need to worry about that.

You should see the <html>, <head>, <title> , and <body> tags that you are familiar with.

TIP

There are many, many tags in HTML and you are probably going to only deal with a few of them. I would like to list all the tags that you can safely ignore, but I think it is easier to say that you should not edit a tag that you haven't seen before unless you consult an HTML tag reference.