Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2006 2:28 am
Yes, a few more questions. What exactly is html and how do I use it? I've tried before but it's always back-fired on me. CSS? What is that? 
Code: Select all
<html>
<head>
<title>My Web Page</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#663F1F" text="#FFFFFF">
<p>This is a web page!</p>
<p>And this <BR> is written on two lines.</p>
</body>
</html>Most tags have an "opening" tag and a "closing" tag. For example, the document starts with <HTML> and ends with </HTML>. They're the opening and closing tags. The rest of your document goes between them.
You don't have to worry about spaces and layout, or upper/lower case. But it's good to lay it out neatly so it's easier to read when you make changes.
Between the <HTML> open and close tags are two sections, <HEAD> and <BODY>. The <HEAD> contains the web page title that appears at the top of your browser window, along with other things like tags for containing search keywords, the character set, the software used to make the page, etc. <TITLE> is the important one to start with, between these you put your page title.
In the <BODY> section you put the actual content that will appear on the page. Notice that the opening <BODY> tag contains two extra pieces of information: bgcolor and text. These control the background colour and default text colour of the web page in hexadecimal. The format is RRGGBB, where R=Red, G=Green, and B=Blue. So #663F1F means Red=66, Green=3F, and Blue=1F. This makes sort of a reddish brown. Bright yellow would be #FFFF00 (strong red and green, no blue). Medium grey would be #7F7F7F. Black is #000000. The text colour in the example is #FFFFFF, which is pure white. There are other values that can go in here, such as the colour of hyperlinks.
In between the <BODY> tags is the content that goes on the page. The <P> tags mean paragraph. You put your text between these. In the second paragraph there's a <BR> tag. This means break, and starts a new line. Note that <BR> doesn't have a closing tag, because it doesn't bracket anything.
That should start you off. You can copy that code into a text file, save it as webpage.html and open it to see what it looks like. If you're using Word, make sure you save it as raw text, because regular Word documents have all kind of extra formatting codes in them and HTML files need to be plain text.
Here's what it looks like on my site:
http://astroboy.cjb.cc/webpage.html
If you click on View -> Source, you can see the text that makes up the page. You can view the source text of any web site, but most of them are too complicated to read these days (like the source for this forum) because they're generated by applications.
If you're using FireFox, it's View -> Page Source. FireFox shows all the tags in a different colour so it's easier to read.
You wanted to know about CSS. It stands for Cascading Style Sheet, and is a separate text file containing all the colours and design elements on your web page. So instead of having #663F1F at the top of every web page, you'd put this in the CSS file and point the HTML file to the CSS file. That way, if you want to change the colours of your web site you only have to change the CSS file instead of every single HTML file (and there could be hundreds). If you're only starting to learn HTML I wouldn't worry about CSS right away.
Of course, you may very well decide not to use a CSS stylesheet anyway, it's up to you.
)
:d oh: 