Chaptersix.Building Your Site

Chapter six. Building Your Site

> Anita: Today we're going to learn about HTML. Isn't that
         programming?


             > Eric: HTML isn't a programming lan
                     guage, it's a markup language. The term comes from the publishing industry,
                     where instructions for things like fonts, spacing, and
                     margins were added to book manuscripts to tell the
                     printers what to do.


> Anita: Wouldn't you do that with a word processor?


             > Eric: Exactly! Except that Word's hiding the markup from you.


> Anita: So can I use Word to create my Web pages?


             > Eric: You can because Word has an option to save a document as
                     HTML. But I wouldn't recommend it, because the HTML it
                     creates isn't that great. You're better off using proper
                     Web-page editing software.

When the three returned to my house for our next session, I could tell that Anita was a bit wary. Stef and Claude seemed eager, however, so I asked Anita what was wrong.

HTML

HTML is an abbreviation for HyperText Markup Language. Hypertext is the original term for electronic documents connected by instantaneous links. For more on the first hypertext project, see http://xanadu.com/

"Well," Anita began, "I'm wondering how technical this session's going to be. Dad may like this stuff, but I don't think either of us"she glanced over at Stef"finds it very interesting."

"Actually," Stef said, "I'm more interested than you think. I didn't like the way my blog looked, so I got my friend to show me enough so I could change it. It was easier than I thought it'd be."

As I motioned for the three of them to sit down, I tried to allay Anita's fears. "Well, Stef, you're ahead of the other two, but it won't take them long to catch up," I said. "I promised you at the beginning that there would be no programming involved, and I'm not changing that promise. You can build a Web site without doing any coding."

Anita spoke up. "But today we're going to learn about HTML. Isn't that programming?"

"A fair question," I answered, "but the answer is no. HTML isn't a programming language, it's a markup languagethat's what the ML in HTML stands for, in fact."

"Still sounds geeky to me," Anita said with a grimace.

"It's not that geeky," I assured her. "The term comes from the publishing industry, where instructions were added to the margins of book manuscripts to tell the printers what to do. This was called marking up the document."

"What kind of instructions?" Claude asked.

"Fonts, spacing, marginsthe things that affect the look of a book," I explained.

"Wouldn't you do that with a word processor?" Anita said.

"Exactly!" I said, glad she had made the connection. "Publishers usually don't mark up paper documents anymore; they use word processors, document formatters, and other software tools. Instead of being on paper, the markup is stored electronically in the document files along with the actual document."

"So when I use Word, I'm using a markup language?" Stef asked.

"Yes," I said, "except that Word's hiding the markup from you. But when you bold a word in a paragraph, for example, Word inserts markup around the text you bolded. When Word goes to display or print the text, it sees the markup and turns on bolding until more markup turns the bolding off."

"And styles are markup too?" she asked, referring to Word's name for collections of formatting instructions.

"Uh-huh," I nodded, "they're just sequences of markup instructions labeled with descriptive names like Heading 1 or Bullet List. You can do similar things with Web pages, too."

"My friend showed me some of that when we customized my blog," Stef said, "but I don't have to worry too much about this stuff because there's a Web page on my blog that lets me add new entries. It lets me do bolding, links, and images, so I guess it adds all the markup automatically." I nodded agreement.

"Well," Anita said, "I don't have a blog…so can I use Word to create my Web pages? I know how to use Word."

"You can," I admitted, "because Word has an option to save a document as HTML. But I wouldn't recommend it, because the HTML it creates isn't that great. You're better off using proper Web-page editing software."

"What software do you recommend?" Claude asked.

"Funny you asked," I said, "because I spent some time the other day looking at what's currently available in preparation for this meeting. I was looking for something free that was simple enough for nonexperts to use. The best one I found is an application called Nvu. There's even a version of it for the Mac, Stef, in case you want to do more than just blog. Let's take a look at it and see how easy it is to build Web pages."

Get Nvu

The Nvu open-source page layout application is available at www.nvu.com.