Web Hosting by Netfirms | Free Domain Names by Netfirms

Creating HTML Documents

How to Create HTML Documents

Creating HTML documents is not rocket science.  If you can create a word processing document you can create Web pages.  HTML documents are in plain text format and can be created using any text editor (e.g., Notepad on Windows or TeachText on Macintosh computers).  There are HTML editors that help you to create HTML documents by making HTML Tag selection easier for the beginner. I recommend DominHTML (http://www.dominocs.com/DHTML/) for Windows and BBEdit (http://www.barebones.com) if you're using a Macintosh.  WebWriter/2 (http://www.filelibrary.com/Contents/OS2/64/121.html) is available for us OS/2 folks..

There are also complete HTML processors (like Word Processors) that allow you to create Web pages in a WYSIWYG environment, although most of them shield you from the code and will be of limited use in learning HTML.  You may want to try AOLPRESS (http://www.aolpress.com) if you're in a Windows 3.x or greater environment as it has a built-in text editor in addition to it's WYSIWYG environment.

So how can you get what you've written in a text editor to be viewed in a browser?  Just save the file as "index.html" or any other name with a ".htm" or ".html" extension at the end.  Then view it in your browser using the instructions below.

If you use a text editor, you can preview documents in progress with your browser.  Open the document using the Open Local (or Open-Local File) option under the File menu.  Use the dialog box fields to locate the document or enter the path and name of the document in the File Name field and press OK.

If you see edits you want to make, enter them in the source file on the text editor.  Then Save the changes, return to your browser and click Reload (or Refresh) on the button bar.  The edits are reflected in the on-screen display.

Jump to top

Inserting HTML Tags

You'll write text, and then you'll insert tags at certain places within your text.  These tags instruct the web browser how to display the text that you've written, just like you bold text or apply paragraph styles in a word processor.

Most tags use the following format:

<tag>some text written here</tag>

There's a start tag, and an end tag.  The start tag just looks like <tag>, but the end tag, </tag>, has a slash in it.  The text within the two tags will be affected by the function of the tag.

Just for an example, let's take the <b> tag and analyze what it does.  Here's a line of HTML:

<b>HTML is easy, isn't it?</b>

This will cause the text within <b> and </b> to be written in bold, like this:

HTML is easy, isn't it?

And it is, isn't it?  HTML is not difficult to learn.  You use some tags to format the text the way you would like it displayed, using either Logical Formatting (e.g., Citation, Emphasis, Strong Emphasis, etc.) or Physical Formatting tags (e.g., Bold, Italic, Typewriter, etc.), and then format the paragraphs using Block Formatting tags (e.g., Address, Blockquote, Heading, etc.).

There are some other tags you won't see that tell the browser what type of document and what version of HTML it is in (see the chapter on Document Type Definition)  addition to specifying the sections of the document, like the Head where other programming and server codes are kept, and the Body which is the text itself.  If you use an HTML Editor it will most likely add these codes for you to the document, usually called a default template.  You can modify this template to change the defaults provided by the HTML Editor and some editors even have a macro language to automate some editing tasks.  In the next section I'll show you what this default template looks like for several versions of HTML and explain it's parts.

Now that we've tackled the basics of editing files it's on to the next chapter of Learning HTML 4.01 where you'll create a simple HTML 4.01 document.  By the way, I've included a small glossary of acronyms and terms you'll need to be familiar with as you go though this guide.

Jump to top

Previous Chapter | Home | Up | Next Chapter

Send feedback and kudos to: peterconrad@hotmail.com
Copyright © 2004 by Web Taming. All Rights Reserved.

For more attractions please visit my Personal Pages on Planet Tripod.