Hour2.Create a Web Page Right Now


Hour 2. Create a Web Page Right Now

This hour guides you through the creation of your first web page. The best way to follow along with this hour is to actually create a web page as you read and model it after the sample pages developed here in the book. If you're a little nervous about jumping right in, you might want to read this hour once to get the general idea and then go through it again at your computer while you work on your own page. But I encourage you to throw caution aside and dive right in!

As mentioned in Hour 1, "Understanding HTML and XHTML," you can use any text editor or word processor to create HTML web pages. Although you may eventually want to use an editor especially designed for HTML, for this hour I recommend that you use Windows Notepad or the Macintosh TextEdit editor that came with your computer. That way you won't have to learn a new software program at the same time you're learning HTML.

Try It Yourself

Before you begin working with this hour, you should start with some text that you want to put on a web page:

1.

Find (or write) a few paragraphs of text about yourself, your family, your company, your softball team, or some other subject in which you're interested.

2.

Be sure to save it as plain, standard ASCII text. Notepad and most simple text editors always save files as plain-text, but you may need to choose this file type as an option (after selecting File, Save As) if you're using another program.

3.

As you go through this hour, you will add HTML commands (called tags) to the text file, making it into a web page. Use Notepad or some other simple text editor to do this; don't use Word or WordPad!

4.

Always give files containing HTML tags a name ending in .html when you save them. This is important: If you forget to type the .html at the end of the filename when you save the file, most text editors will give it some other extension (such as .txt or .doc). If that happens, you may not be able to find it when you try to look at it with a web browser. In other words, web browsers expect web pages to have a file extension of .html; you may also encounter web pages with a file extension of .htm, which is also acceptable. There are also other file extensions used on the Web such as .asp (Microsoft Active Server Pages) and .php (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), but they are typically related to technologies beyond the scope of HTML.

By the Way

If you're using TextEdit on a Macintosh computer, the steps for creating a web page are a little different than for Windows Notepad. You must first select Make Plain Text from the Format menu and then change the preferences under the Saving header by unchecking the box for Append '.txt' Extension to Plain Text Files. Also, the default preferences are set to show .html documents as they would appear in a browser, which won't allow you to edit them. To fix this, check Ignore Rich Text Commands in HTML Files under the Rich Text Processing header.





SAMS Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours
Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours (7th Edition)
ISBN: 0672328410
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 345

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