Beginners guide to HTML

Lesson 1 - Words

Web Browsers lay out the text as they want, you just tell them the significant features of the text. All HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) consists of ordinary text and special marks in < Here >. The marks in the text are either just individual things such as <thing> or they affect a block of text, in which case one writes <thing> this is the text affected by thing </thing>. Markups can generally be in any case.

Lines can be as long as you want or as short as one word - it makes no difference to the result. Spaces and new lines are just treated as breaks between words, layout is ignored. Markups make '<' and '>' special, so to put them (and '&') in text use &lt; for < and &gt; for > and &amp; for &. The '&' and the ';' at the end are significant.

Bold

To put text in bold do <b>This is in bold</b> to produce This is in bold.

Italic

To put text in italic do <i>This is in italic</i> to produce This is in italic.

Paragraphs

At the end of a paragraph (where you actually want a paragraph break) do a <p>.

New Lines

If you want to force a new line, but not a paragraph do a <br>.

Headings

HTML supports 6 levels of headings. H1 is the biggest, H6 the smallest. Use them in order of significance. You don‘t need a paragraph break before a heading.

<h1>This is a big section heading</h1>
This is some introductory text
<h2>this is a lower heading</h2>
This is ordinary text

Every Document

Each html document should end .html (or .htm for older dos machines).

At the start of every HTML document put the following:
<html><head>
<title>Whatever you want as the title of the page</title>
</head><body>

The main text of the page goes here,
then at the end put:

</body></html>

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Updated 17th of October 2002