HTML by Wendy Willard

From the Publisher

Essential HTML Skills--Made Easy!

Create highly functional, impressive websites in no time. Fully updated and revised, HTML: A Beginner's Guide, Fourth Edition explains how to structure a page, place images, format text, create links, add color, work with multimedia, and use forms. You'll also go beyond the basics and learn how to save your own web graphics, use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), create dynamic web content with basic JavaScript, and upload your site to the web. By the end of the book you'll be able to build custom websites using the latest HTML techniques. An all-new chapter also covers creating HTML for e-mail, a hot-button issue for any business seeking to reach its target audience through online communication.

Designed for Easy Learning

• Key Skills & Concepts--Chapter-opening lists of specific skills covered in the chapter
• Ask the Expert--Q&A sections filled with bonus information and helpful tips
• Try This--Hands-on exercises that show you how to apply your skills
• Notes--Extra information related to the topic being covered
• Tips--Helpful reminders or alternate ways of doing things
• Self-Tests--Chapter-ending quizzes to test your knowledge

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Module 1: Getting Started

• Understand the Internet as a medium for disseminating information
• Plan for the audience, goals, structure, content, and navigation of your site
• Identify the basic differences between the different types of HTML editors
• Learn from the pros using the VIEW SOURCE command of popular Web browsers

For as long as I have been involved in making Web pages, people have asked me to teach them the process. In the beginning, many people are intimidated at the thought of learning HTML. Fear not. One of the reasons I decided to go to art school was to avoid all math and science classes. So, as I tell my students . . . if I could learn HTML, so can you.

HTML is not rocket science. Quite simply, HTML is a means of telling a Web browser how to display a page. That's why it's called HTML, which is the acronym for Hypertext Markup Language. Like any new skill, HTML takes practice to comprehend what you are doing.

Before we dive into the actual creation of the Web pages, you need to understand a few things about the Internet. I could probably fill an entire book with the material in this first chapter, but the following should provide you with a firm foundation.

Understanding the Medium

When you are asked to write a term paper in school, you don't just sit down and start writing. First, you have to do research and learn how to format the paper. When you decide to write and design a Web page, the process is similar.

The Anatomy of a Web Site

Undoubtedly, you have seen a few Web sites by now. Perhaps, you know someone who is a Web geek, and you have watched him navigate through a Website by chopping off pieces of the Web address. Do you ever wonder what he is doing? He knows a little bit about the anatomy of a Web site and how the underlying structure is laid out.

Ask the Expert

Answer: The World Wade Web (WWW or the Web) is often confused with the Internet. While the Internet was originally created during the Cold War as a way to link sections of the country together during an emergency, the Web didn't really exist until the late 19$0s. At that time, Tim Berners-Lee created a set of technologies that allowed information on the Internet to be linked together through the use of links, or connections, in documents. The language component of these technologies is HTML.

The Web was mostly text based until Marc Andreessen created the first Web browser in 1992, called Mosaic. This paved the way for video, sound, and photos on the Web.

As a large group of interconnected computers all over the world, the Internet comprises not only the Web, but also things like newsgroups (online bulletin boards) and e-mail. Many people think of the Web as the graphical or illustrated part of the Internet...