Introduction to HTML -- Basic HTML Page

Basic HTML Page
Here is a very simple HTML document:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Home Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
Welcome to my home page! See my <A HREF = "mypage2.html">next 
page</A> for more stuff.
<P>
Thanks for coming!
</BODY>

</HTML>
There's obviously not much to this page, but it shows several tag elements that generally make up all HTML documents. The first is the HTML element, which contains the entire document and specifies the markup language being used is HTML.
Next is the HEAD element. This contains information about the document, as well as the title of the document in the TITLE element, and anything not considered part of the document's body.
The BODY element marks the displayed document itself, and would contain all of the document text elements. Within the BODY element you'll find the Paragraph element (<P>), which starts a new paragraph in the document.
Also in the BODY element is the A or Anchor element. This is used to define a hypertext or other link to another article. Note that the Anchor tag also includes HREF, which is known as a tag or element attribute. In this case, the HREF (Hypertext REFerence) attribute for the Anchor element defines the contained text string as such.
For thorough coverage of HTML Page development (yes, even more so than these pages...), see Dr. Graham's Introduction to HTML at: http://www.utoronto.ca/webdocs/HTMLdocs/NewHTML/htmlindex.html

Page Construction
Here are some general guidelines and common sense advice to keep in mind when creating an HTML document; but remember, there are few hard and fast rules out there:

Though artistic freedom should never be stymied, be aware that the design (formatting) of a document is mainly in the hands of the application viewing it. How you see it in Netscape Navigator is not how someone using the text-based Lynx will. If a feature of your page(s) depends on a specific browser being used to view it correctly, give a warning to that effect.
White space in your document, meaning anything that's not a printable character, is generally ignored in HTML.
Keep aware of the size of your content. A good rule of thumb is to have a Web page no longer than three 'legal-size' pages in length, and graphics on a page (or at least on your home page) add up to no more than 45-50Kb. If you have a lot of information to provide, try breaking it up logically into separate pages (like the Introduction to HTML pages), and link to them from your home page.
Though the Web is a newer medium, the old rules of style for writing and design easily apply here, too.
For more on style when creating HTML pages, see:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/0/docs/heasarc/Style_Guide/styleguide.html

Back to HTML Index
On to Formatting

Back to the Ziplink 101 page ©2000 ZipLink. All Rights Reserved.