HTML for Technophobes

HTML for Technophobes.
©David Knopfler/Willa Cline July 1998

Lesson one: Ignore jargon.

The only thing you'll need to know is that WYSIWYG "What you see is what you get" is going to make your life a whole lot easier than fiddling around in all that murky hypertext mark up language (HTML) with all those peculiar shaped brackets. What you'll need is an application that does it for you - fortunately WYSIWYG applications do just that. There are a large number of them available - the three I'd most recommend are VisualPage from Symantec, HomePage from Filemaker Inc. (formally Claris), and PageMill from Adobe. That's it. Job done. VisualPage is so easy to use you'll not even need the manual. I have never once opened the bonnet of my car - but I can fill it with petrol and get from A to B - that's what a WYSIWYG application does - gets your work onto the web without you having to worry about the techie stuff.

Having said that, I might as well fill the rest of this page with some techie stuff you can choose to ignore if you want. If you want to see what this page, for example looks like "under the bonnet" then all you need to do is lift the lid and this is how you'll do it:

With your browser (that's probably going to be either Netscape's Communicator, or Microsoft's Internet Explorer) you simply need to click up on your menu bar on the View menu - that will open a pop up menu list and on that list you'll see Page Source - if you click on that you'll see a new page open up - it'll start with a load of scary stuff that begins

<HTML> <HEAD><TITLE>HTML for Technophobes</TITLE></HEAD><BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> HTML for Technophobes.  Lesson one. Ignore jargon. The only thing you'll need to know is that WYSIWYG ....

and so forth. Don't panic - you can close that page again now.

95% of the stuff generated in these pages you can safely ignore and better still we won't even bore you by telling you what it is... If you didn't leave the room reeling with sudden nausea, the more discerning of you will have noticed that in amongst all that crud is some writing that looks exactly like the writing on this page. Aha! First light in the darkness. The blue colour by the way is only to make it easier to see what is techie stuff and what isn't. It's the brackets not the colour that makes it do exciting things. also you can write your code in normal text or capitalised. We recommend you stick to capitalised text for your code only because it makes it easier to distinguish.

For a piece of text to be a html file it simply has to have <HTML> in front of it and </HTML> at the end of it . If you add that, your browser will know it must behave itself and show the page to you, ignoring all the frightening stuff in brackets. Now we've gone this far you might as well know what some of these scary brackets can do for you.

This one creates a new paragraph - which is really useful isn't it? Every time you put that into your page ... bingo ... a new paragraph will appear. And this one is a new line. It's a carriage return Baby that's all ... it won't bite. This one which makes your text bold is only slightly scarier because you have to remember that you can't have a without also having a .. in general if you're in doubt, assume that what goes up must come down, so think pairs.Your thingie in the bracket has gone and told your browser that it wants it to display the information in a special way. It'll go on displaying it that way until you tell it to stop - that's where the forward slash in the second of the pair comes in BOLD .. alright kids bedtime. We'll do images tomorrow after I've brushed up on it.

Click here for Chapter Two