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0. Standardly Speaking About HTML

Ahhh, there are always rules to follow. For HTML, fortunately, the rules are few in number and what they offer is large...

Objectives

This is just an introduction to some concepts behind HTML. After this lesson you will be able to:

Lesson

HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is how a web browser displays its multimedia documents. The documents themselves are plain text files (ASCII) with special "tags" or codes that a browser knows how to interpret and display on your screen.

About those standards

No kidding -- the World Wide Web is exciting. It is everywhere.

Keep in mind that the thing that makes the Web (and the Internet in general) work are agreed-upon rules that allow users of almost any kind of computer able to communicate and share information.

Where does HTML fit into all of this?

Well, what we are going to cover in this tutorial is aimed toward producing documents that comply with the HTML standards. By using "standard" HTML, your work is going to be most widely "share-able" in the fast changing future of the 'net. The current standards are known as HTML 2.0 which are going to be supported by most web browsers.

Things get somewhat more complicated for some of the proposed features to be included in HTML 3.2 since Netscape and Microsoft have introduced many features that go beyond standard HTML, and may only be supported by certain web browsers.

What does this mean? If you include HTML that may look snazzy in Netscape or Explorer, be aware that it may look pretty ugly when viewed from another browser. Keep in mind that readers of your web pages may not only be using different browsers, but their monitor size and fonts may not be the same as on the system you designed the pages.

After all, you are probably not going to spend all of this time designing web pages that are for your viewing only! The idea is to make something that the world can view. So the first section of lessons will take you through the most widely accepted features of HTML. From there, you can make the decision to use some of the "deluxe" features.

Review Topics

  1. What is HTML?
  2. Why should you be concerned about differences in HTML standards?

Coming Next....

Time to start writing! Are you ready? In the next lesson you will see how to juggle three open windows as you write your first lines of HTML.
GO TO.... | Lesson Index | next: "Creating Your First HTML Document" |


Writing HTML Lesson 0: Standardly Speaking
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