<html>
<h1>Example
page</h1>
<br />
<p> This is an
example page. A clickable link can be found <a
href="code-buddy.blogspot.com">here!</a>
</html>
This is incredibly simple, and would not pass as a real website today, but
it does show the basic way in which HTML really works. Tags are nested
inside other tags, but that's not all; while not quite necessary, I have used
separate lines and indentation to make it easy to read our code.
I do this because anyone (including myself) who will inevitably come along
to alter the code for any reason will have a tougher time deciphering it if it
looks like this:
<html><h1>Example page</h1><br /><p>This is
an example page. A clickable link can be found <a
href="code-buddy.blogspot.com">here!</a></html>
While its certainly not impossible to read that particular piece of code,
keep in mind that coding can easily span hundreds of lines, very quickly. Many
decent pages have so many lines of code it would be a screwy task to even try
counting them all!
So, the point is, keep your code clean and clear, for both our sake, and
yours!
Public service announcement aside, let's get down to the nitty-gritty
historitty (yeah, I did that) of the wonderful language we call HTML. As I
explained in the last post on the subject, HTML stands ofr Hypertext Mark-up
Language -- essentially, a fancy way to say it's a coding language with stylish
text and links to other pages.
It was created in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee, an intelligent man who looked at
the work of his fellow scientists, and realized it would be easier if they could
all share their work on the Internet with pages that linked to other
pages (with relative information). Even better, these pages could be stylized
so as to make reading easier, like in a book, or magazine.
Internet browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox, or Internet Explorer, or Google
Chrome, all use HTML. Usually it is conjunction with another popular language, CSS,
or Cascading Style Sheets. Don't worry about that right now; we will
gradually work into it! Just know that HTML is for function, and CSS is for
style -- not the other way around!
To start writing HTML, you just need a text editor, such as Notepad.
Editors like Notepad are valuable to coding because they do not interfere with
the code's text, unlike Microsoft Word and other word processors. You don't
even need to be online, or connected to the internet at all, to code HTML.
After you've saved the text file with the code, you can open it using your
browser (via "File" -> "Open") to see what it would look
like as a webpage.
Neat, huh?
Keep an eye for the next post on HTML, which will explain more in-depth the
different parts of HTML coding!
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