Making Your Own Web Page

So you want to make a web page? This site should give you the basics to get you started and then you can go on to my list-o-links to find out more. This page is a condensed rough draft of part of a book I am writing about making web pages. This page is the result of extensive research on this topic. I think it is quite accurate, but I don't take any responsibility if, in following my advice, your computer blows up or you in some other way come to harm. That being said... here we go... (I'll put a table of contents in later to make this a little easier to read.)

First, you should know

You should know that this page is in its infancy. I just started writing this, so check back in a couple of weeks... Until then go to my HTML,etc. links page (http://www.ualberta.ca/~rditzian/htmlinks.html)

What you need to do in order to have a web page is:

Get Internet access - either get a server, lease a server or just get some web space. Various resources for this are listed on my list'o'links page. If you have an e-mail account, you may already have the access you need to make a web page. Ask your Internet service provider if you can make web pages on your account.
Make a special directory for the public on your account. There are different rules for how to do this depending on who is running your account. At the University of Alberta, the guidelines are given HERE for how to make your directory public. Note that only this directory and everything you put in it will be public - no one will be able to read your e-mail and such.
Use a text editor to write your HTML files. A text editor can be the vi editor, pico (which I personally usually use), or any text editor or word-processing program. If you use a word processor, be sure to save your files in TEXT only. Save files as filename.html or filename.htm (when using DOS which doesn't allow more than three letters).
Move the files into your public directory using some sort of FTP(File Transport Protocol) program. The most common I have seen are WS_FTP for Windows and Fetch for the Mac. They are really easy to use once you know how. If you don't know how, I am sure you can find some help somewhere on the Internet or just read the instruction manual (if you have one).

Now, on to WRITING HTML!!!

HTML is tricky to teach because it keeps changing. Fortunately, the changes are not by any stretch fundamental. Fundamental HTML has been quite static.

The DOCTYPE

The start of most HTML documents is a statement of the particular dialect of HTML your document is written in. My favorite dialects (because they are the standard ones) are:

HTML 2.0 - this was the standard as of September 22, 1995. All browsers were required to conform to this. So in other words, documents written in HTML 2.0 were readable regardless of the type of browser (eg. Netscape, Lynx, Mosaic, Internet Explorer, etc, etc). Soon, however, it became apparent that HTML 2.0 was not sufficient to do all the neat things that people wanted HTML to do. Various extensions to HTML were made that only worked on certain browsers. That was bad. HTML 3.0 was proposed to overcome this, but it was never presented as a standard. The document expired and that was that.
Recently, the folks at w3 came up with HTML 3.2, which can do much more than HTML 2.0. It is called Wilbur although I do not know why. I think it may be a reference to Charlotte's Web by E.B. White in which a small pig named Wilbur was saved by the web writings of a spider named Charlotte. W3 says we should expect a more detailed version soon which is to be called Cougar.

The statement of the dialect being used is called the DOCTYPE and it is written like this:

Standard HTML 2.0's doctype is:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0 Strict Level 2//EN">

I could explain to you exactly why this is the doctype name for HTML 2.0 but it is beyond the scope of this discussion.

Standard HTML 3.2's doctype is:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">

So that is the DOCTYPE and you put it at the top of your HTML document. If you leave it out, the browser will make some assumptions but usually it is fine and nothing will blow up.

Well, this page is really under construction... you know what they say - Rome was not built in a day and all, so please be patient and for more info, consult my list -o- links below.

RACHELLE'S LIST O' HTML LINKS

rditzian@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca

Rachelle's Homepage
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Last updated - May 02, 1996