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You would like to know how to make nifty pages like the one you're watching right now? OK. All you have to do is have a little patience and understand the basics of HTML. If you don't understand the basics, you probably won't understand the advanced part. You can read a manifesto about good HTML authoring and the principles of doing so (I personally recommend it, it is very good), named Hints for Web Authors. So, here is a brief introduction to HTML:
HTML is a 'document description language'. Its purpose is to make the page authoring easier, by specifying basic common elements, such as titles, lists, keywords, links. In general scope, that's why you should try to make your page user-friendly and easy to understand. HTML is not designed to be a page description language (like PostScript) which is designed to allow perfect control over what's displayed and printed, it has been designed so that it is simple, and therefore, not all browsers display the same formatting for a given document.
Have you ever seen WordPerfect (the DOS version)? If you have seen it, you probably know the 'hidden codes' concept. HTML uses text codes enclosed in < >. It's easy: for example, if you want to put some text in italics, you use a code to activate italics, and another code to deactivate it afterwards.
<tagname [argument1=value] [argument2=value]>which means that every tag begins with a < left angle bracket, then comes the name of the tag, such as P or BR or stuff... and then come the arguments or properties for the tag. Some tags also have their corresponding </tagname> tag beginning with a slash. The tags that require an opening and a closing tags are called containers, which means they "contain" and affect elements (text and/or graphics) within their boundaries. Not every tag is a container. I'll explain whenever a tag needs closing or not.
Arguments are parameters that modify a tag's behavior. They are expressed in the form argument=value; values usually must be enclosed in quotes, especially if they have any non alphanumeric (letters and symbols) characters. Note that not every tag requires arguments, which are usually used to modify the tag's behavior and effects on the document. If the value is a text of chain with quotes in it, you will have to alternate the quotes in it, for example, quoting with double quotes the entire value, and changing any double quotes it might have to single quotes.
HTML constricts any extra spaces you put to one space, and does not pay attention to carriage returns (that's strange, but there's a way way to tell the browser where to finish a line). Ah, one more thing: the tags are not case sensitive, but the URLs and filenames DO!.
The heart of an HTML document is supposed to be the multimedia content. It's expressed in very different ways: hyperlinks, graphics and multimedia content. The interesting part of the hyperlinks is that they let you jump across pages and systems without ever losing track of what you're doing, always able to backtrack through previous views and documents with the touch of a single key: the Back button. If you are not using links on your page, better expose it in a newspaper or write it in some obscure Word document and save it on your harddisk than post it on the net!
Click here to get a deeper explanation on how files are referenced to in the Internet.
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