Okay...so you have a blank box with a few of these tag things in it, and you're probably asking, "what am I supposed to do with this?!?". Well, you should start by erasing all of the contents of it. In other words, just delete the >html< and >body< and all that other stuff. We're going to start from the beginning!
<HTML>
<html> is ALWAYS going to be the first line of a simple web page like this. No exceptions!! This is what tells the internet people that they are reading an HTML document. The .html at the end of the filename doesn't do it. Once you have typed this single line, you have yourself a web page!! Tada! "But....it doesn't have anything on it." you complain. Don't worry. It will soon. Also, at the end of the document, don't forget to put </HTML> on the last line!
<title>
Before I teach you about tags, I'm going to share this nifty thing with you. Just put <title> in the line right after the <html> line, followed by the title of the page, followed by </title>. All in the same line. Tada! Click the "preview" button and look at the blue button on the top of your browser. Pretty cool, right!?! Since I shared this secret with you, I'll go ahead and tell you about the <body> flag.
Flags
Everything you see on a page is placed on there by some flag. Some are very, very simple, like the ones that I will introduce to you on this page. Oh! There's a good example. How did I get that word to be in italics?! Simple!! All I did was type this:
Tada!! Now you know your first HTML tag! You can make ANY text that you want in italics by simply telling the internet people, by putting <i> wherever you want to start the italics! Think of it like a word processor. Typing <i> is exactly like clicking on the italics button, and </i> is exactly like clicking it again, to turn it off! Isn't that easy?! Oh, and HTML is not case sensitive, (doesn't care about whether the stuff inside the greater than and less than signs is upper or lower case) so I could type either <I> or <i>, and it would do the exact same thing. Anyways...now that you understand how tags work, I can teach you two new tags! The bold tag, the underline tag, and the typewriter tag!
Since you already understand the concept of using flags to maniuplate text, I'll give you a few more:
Pretty neat, right?!? There is a catch to all this coolness, though. Headings aren't like ordinary text. They are headings, so they kinda stand alone. In order to make text big like this, you'll have to type something else. I'll explain that one in the next tutorial. But before you move on, there are a few other very simple flags that I'd like to show you!
Spacing:
In HTML, anything can go anywhere. That's another reason why it doesn't exactly qualify as a computer language. I could put all of this text 50 lines down with 50 lines of blank space, and it'd still show up right here. That's why we need spacing flags!! Here's a table telling what they can do:
Well, now you know how to mess around with spacing. Here's one last command for you in this tutorial:
<br>
This command puts a "break" in the text. This would be the equivelant to pressing the return key on a word processor
<p>
This command starts a new paragraph. This would be the equivelant to pressing the return key on a word processor twice!
Well, that's it for this tutorial. See you in the next one soon!
Please email questions or comments to rchild000@yahoo.com. Thanks!