If you will be including images or sounds in your document, you will likely want to have a paint or sound program available. These will only be neccessary in the preparation of those elements. The actual HTML to link them into your document will be created with the text editor.
HTML documents are entirely text, including the directives to include sounds, images, movies, and postscript documents. Text is the "lowest common denominator" on the network: All computers can understand it.
Opening local files like this will help you get the format and layout correct, without having to worry about network protocols, and the associated headaches that they often include.
<like this> ,
to help make sure that they are not mistaken for real text.
Here's a sample fragment of a simple HTML document.
<H2>My First HTML Document</H2> This is a sample of the <I>Hyper Text Markup Language</I>. Notice that extra white space and newlines are ignored.
<H1> and
<I>
marks are used to specify font sizes and typeface. When this document is
viewed using a browser, the output might look like this:
Many HTML tags are paired. This means that the tag which activates a HTML option must have a following tag which deactivates that option. This is accomplished by repeating the tag with a forward slash (/)in the brackets. For example, to display the word italics in italics the tag is<I>. So the HTML code would look like this: <I>italics</I>. If you do not include the </I>, the rest of your text will be in italics until the client finds a closing tag.
When your browser reads the HTML source file, it performs a number of formatting operations to make it look presentable. It may need to break lines in different places, depending upon the font size that the client is using. Because of this, it will ignore multiple spaces, tabs, and new lines in your source document. In fact, the entire source file can be on one long line. Whether on one line, or on twenty, it will be formatted the same when opened by the client.
In these above example, the HTML keywords were written in all caps, but this is not necessary. HTML clients will recognize them as tags regardless of the case of the letters. However, many people do use all upper case to further distinguish the tags from the document's text.
Here's a template for a typical HTML document:
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Template HTML Document</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> Your document goes here. </BODY> </HTML>
Now, go to the "view" menu in your browser and click on the option called "view source." This will let you see the source code for this page. Print it out, and then compare it to the page that you see now. This will give you some initial insight into how HTML works.