INTRODUCTION

A web site is made up of electronic documents called WEB PAGES. The commands or code used in constructing a web page is called HTML or HyperText Markup Language.

Hyper (H): Meaning text that can jump from one location to another on the web, ie "all over the place".

Text (T): Or more precisely, text only files. This is because HTML browsers can only read text files.

Markup (M): Text that is marked up in some way by what are known as "TAGS", "ELEMENTS", "FLAGS", "COMMANDS" or "INSTRUCTIONS". Example: <B>Your text goes here</B>. The <B> and </B> tags are used for making "Your text goes here" bold.

Language (L): Although strictly speaking, HTML is not a programming language like BASIC, FORTRAN or C.

The necessary steps for writing HTML code are as follows:

1. Use a TEXT EDITOR (Notepad) to type in your text in English.
2. Format the text using HTML tags.
3. Save As "your file name.html". Notepad automatically saves all files as Text Only type. To reduce complexity, keep your files in one folder.

The following building blocks are used for constructing HTML documents:

1. Text
2. Images
3. Sound
4. Links
5. Lists
6. Tables
7. Frames
8. Forms
9. Style Sheets
10. Scripts

Example 1: Italics Tag (I)

<I>Your text goes here</I>

<I> is called the OPENING TAG.
</I> is called the CLOSING TAG (contains a forward slash).

Example 2: Image Tag (IMG)

<IMG SRC="image.gif">

SRC is an ATTRIBUTE of the IMG tag.
"image.gif" is a VALUE of the SRC attribute.
Note the absence of a closing tag.

The following tags show the basic outline of a web page and must appear in every SOURCE DOCUMENT (ie the HTML CODE for a web page) or HTML DOCUMENT:

1. Right click anywhere on the screen where there is no text or image.
   
   
2. Left click on View Source.