1. What is HTML?Q. What is HTML?
2. Is HTML a programming language?
3. What is a hyperlink?
4. What is a URL?
5. Do I need to go to school or anything to learn how to write HTML documents?
6. How should I go about learning to create an HTML document?
7. How can I view the HTML of a web page?
8. What do I need to do to create my own HTML document?
9. Now that I've created my own HTML document, how do I put it on the internet for others to see?
10. What are some other HTML resources available on the internet?
A. HTML is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language. Your browser reads the HTML for a page and then translates it into what you see on your screen.
Q. So HTML is a programming language?
A. No. HTML is a formatting language, meaning that it is just a set of commands (called tags) to tell your web browser how to display pages. These tags specify things like font type and size, background color, image sizes, and hyperlinks.
A. A hyperlink is a tag in a HTML document that tells the browser to switch URLs if the image or word that is hyperlinked is clicked by the viewer. Clicking this hyperlink will tell your browser to move to the top of this document.
A. URL stands for universal resource locator and is usually expressed in the form http://www.domainname.com
Q. Do I need to go to school or anything to learn how to write HTML documents?
A. No, anyone who can read and follow directions should be able to do some HTML programming. It does take a certain amount of skill and ingenuity to create some of the more complicated web pages that you see on the web; that is why people get paid to create web pages. Any of us could build a shelter that would keep us protected from the elements but that is not to say that any of us could design and build something like the Guggenheim Museum of Art.
Q. How should I go about learning to create an HTML document?
A. A good first step in learning HTML is to go out on the web and look at the HTML of some fairly simplistic pages. By doing this you can see the general structure of HTML and some of the tags associated with it.
Q.How can I view the HTML of a web page?
A. Go to the page that you want to
see the HTML of and click on 'View' in your browser's menu. Then click
on 'Source' or 'Document Source' depending on what browser you are using.
Q. What do I need to do to create my own HTML document?
A. There are a couple of different ways of doing this. The first would be to learn some HTML and then write the HTML into a new document and save it with an extension of .html or .htm. The other way of going about creating an HTML document is to get a program that creates the HTML code by using WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get - pronounced whizeewig). Using a WYSIWYG editor, you don't need to know any HTML at all though it is helpful. Some popular WYSIWYG editors are Netscape Navigator Gold, Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe Pagemill. You could also use a HTML editor, such as Hot Dog, which isn't WYSIWYG but definitely helps in the construction of HTML documents.
Q.Now that I've created my own HTML document, how do I put it on the internet for others to see?
A. If you have an account with Athenet
Data Exchange, you automatically have 5Mb of space reserved for you on
our server. You need to FTP
your HTML files to the '/home/your username/public_html' directory on our
server and your page will be available for viewing on the internet. The
URL for your personal web page will be located at http://www.athenet.net/~your
username if you are an Athenet client and http://www.dataex.com/~your
userneme if you are a client of the Data Exchange.
Here are some other HTML resources available to you on the internet: