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The Basics of HTML (a good place to start)HTML is the language of the world wide web. The acronym stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and is used to create a large percentage of the sites on the web today, either in whole or part. All HTML documents follow a certain pattern no matter how simple or complex they may be. Every HTML document starts out and ends the same way:
Almost all HTML statements (such as HTML NomenclatureThe following terms are used regularly throughout this site:
As shown in the glossary of terms above, most HTML statements are double-ended. These double-ended statements are easy to remember if you think of them as parentheses. Should you forget to close a statement, HTML will either display the opening portion of script in the browser window, and the desired effect will be absent; or the remainder of the page will be affected by the unclosed statement. Keep a close eye out for this when checking over your site. |
The Anatomy of a URLAnyone who uses the internet, say, you for example, knows what a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) does. But how does it work, and what does all that gibberish mean? Let's analyze the URL of this page: https://www.angelfire.com/ok/blankstares/basicfacts.html http:// tells the browser that it is looking up a website, much like C:\ tells Windows to search the Hard Drive. The acronym stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. There are many others, the most notable being ftp, or file transfer protocol, a method of uploading files to a server. Others that come to mind (which you will rarely see online, unless you are using a really bizzare service) are telnet:, gopher://, news:, mailto:, wais:, https://, and file:// www is a domain name, meaning in this case World Wide Web. Many other domains exist, most notably www2. Most tripod member pages start with "members"; and Fortune City pages are known to start with virtually anything! angelfire is the server (or host) name. This tells the browser where to go to look up directories and files. ".com" is also part of the domain name, and again there are many others, such as ".net" ".org" ".nu" and ".edu". ok/ is the angelfire directory where this site is located. blankstares/ is the sub-directory that contains the specific files related to the pages in this site. (Graphics, music, etc). basicfacts.html is the name of this particular file. The music in the background is called augustan.mid . Dots (periods) in a URL tell the browser to stay on the current step (server, directory, etc.) while slashes tell it to move to the next stated direcory, sub-directory, or file. If you are acustomed to using a MacOS-based system, then you may tend to think of organizing files into hierarchical folders; this is the same concept, just with a different name. It is virtually identical to the "file path" commonly found on Windows-based machines. | |
