Archive for html
More HTML Formatting Help
Posted by: | CommentsWe have already covered some basic HTML tags you will use when writing your web page code. Here are a few more that you might find come in handy, when designing your own web page.
Image Tags
In HTML, when you want to call upon an image to be displayed on your web page, you need to use the img tag. This tag tells the browser and web server that you are going to put an image here, and then what follows src= is the direct path to the image in question.
Code: <img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/yourimage.jpg” />
Horizontal Rule Tags
The horizontal rule is for making a nice separator between sections of your web page. It acts as a single solid line that can be placed anywhere on your web page. It looks like this:
Code: <hr />
List Tags
If you want to format a list of topics on a single page, then the list tags will come in handy. You would start a list with the <ul> tag and end it with the </ul> tag. For each item on the list, you will want to wrap it in the <li> and </li> tags.
Code: <ul> <li>item #1</li> <li>item #2</li> </ul>
Ordered List Tags
If you want to format a list of topics on a single page, and have them numbered, the ordered list tags should be used. You would start a list with the <ol> tag and end it with the </ol> tag. For each item on the list, you will want to wrap it in the <li> and </li> tags.
Code: <ol> <li>item #1</li> <li>item #2</li> </ol>
Link Tags
Links are used to help users go from one page to the next page. The basic link is started with the <a href=”"> tag with the page’s path you want to link to inside the quotation marks. Then you type in the text of the link, and close it out with the </a> tag.
Code: <a href=”http://www.somedomain.com/pageiamlinkingto.html”>This Text is a Link</a>
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Basic HTML Formatting Help
Posted by: | CommentsWhen it comes to formatting a web page using HTML code, you can think of it (kind of) in the same way you would look at formatting a document formatted by a word processor. You have your headlines to show you where one section starts and stops. You have your paragraphs to break up blocks of text, and you have line breaks to show where there should be a new line started. Now I am going to show you how to get some of these things done using HTML.
Headline Tags
The main purpose of the headline tags are make the titles stand out on the page, and also tell the browser and visitors where the titles are. You can use <h1></h1> for the main title, then (if needed) <h2></h2> for a secondary title. The bigger the number gets, the smaller or less important the title becomes. Remember to use the headline tags for headings only. It is not a good idea to use them to make text bigger or bolder. Also, search engines look at how your headline tags are used to help index the structure of the content on your web pages.
Code: <h1>This Is My Title</h1>
Paragraph Tags
The paragraph tags are important because they show the start (
) and then end
of where a paragraph should be on your web page. Having a long page with nothing but unformatted text is going to be very hard for the reader to navigate through. You want to break up the web page with the paragraph tags to make the web page your working on more scan-able for the end user.
Code: <p>This will be shown as it’s own paragraph on my web page.</p>
Line Break Tags
What if you don’t want to go to a new paragraph, and instead only want to break of one line and move to the line right under it? That is what the
or
tags are for. You might see either used, however it might be best to start using
to future-proof your web page for browsers in the future (just in case support for
was ever dropped.
Code: I can put this at the end of a line to show where I want it to stop. <br />
Blockquote Tags
When text has been blockquoted, it is often indented a little – in comparison with the other paragraphs around it. So you get white space to the left, and the margins around the text are enlarged a little ‘bit to seperate it from the rest of the text.
Code: <blockquote>This text will be shown as indented on my web page.</blockquote>
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Modify the HTML Body Tag
Posted by: | CommentsThere are several HTML tags that can act as modifiers to how the web page looks visually.
First, let us re-visit the body tags. The body tags are there to tell the browser what part of the document is going to be visible to the end user when viewing the web page. This is marked up in your HTML code by putting a <body> where your web page’s content begins and a </body> tags where it ends.
How to Modify the Body Tag
So, any time you modify the body tags, you will be changing the way the web site is seen. There are several body tag modifiers you can use.
Change the Web Page’s Background Color
You can add bgcolor=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the background color for a web page.
- Code: <body bgcolor=”white”> (this would make the background all white)
Change the Web Page’s Text Color
You can add text=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the background color for a web page.
- Code: <body text=”black”> (this would make the text all black)
Change the Web Page’s Link Color
You can add link=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the color of links on a web page.
- Code: <body link=”blue”> (this would make the links all blue)
Change the Web Page’s Visited Link Color
You can add vlink=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the color of link that have already been visited on a web page.
- Code: <body vlink=”red”> (this would make the visited links red)
Change the Web Page’s Active Link Color
You can add alink=”VALUE” (replacing VALUE with the name of the color or the HEX number) to change the color of an active link.
- Code: <body alink=”purple”> (this would make the active link purple)
More Helpful Body Tag Tips
You can use more than one of these at a time. If you wanted to, you could use more than one of these body modifiers at a time. you would just need to remember to put a space in between each body modifier. For example:
<body bgcolor="black" color="white">
This is how you would link more than one together, this would tell the browser to make the background of the web page black and the text on the web page white. There is no limit to the number of these modifiers you can use on the body tag, as long as everything is formatted correctly, the web page should come out the way you want it to.
Only add these modifiers to the opening body tag. It is important to note that you only add these modifiers to the opening tag <body> and not the closing tag </body>.
Where can I find the HTML color or HEX values? You can find these many places. One of the best examples, is on w3school.com’s HTML colors page here:
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Basic Parts of a Website Layout
Posted by: | CommentsWhen it comes to very basic website design, every website layout has four basic elements that you should learn. These are the HTML tags, the head tags, the title tags and the body tags. Each one plays an important part in presenting your website data to the public.
Let’s look at this example of some very basic website code and then I’ll tell you about each part:
<html> <head> <title>My First Web Site</title> </head> <body> This is my first web site. I hope you enjoy it! </body> </html>
The HTML Tags
The <html> and </html> tags wrapped around the text tells you this is an HTML document. They signify the start of the web page and the end of the web page.
The Head Tags
The <head> and </head> tags wrapped around the title tags tell the web browser this is where you can get specific information about this page, and how it is displayed. The head tags must be at the top of the page, after the first HTML tag.
The Title Tag
The <title> and </title> tags tells the browser that what is in between here is the title for the web page. It will be shown (in most browser) at the top of the menu and on the tab you are browsing from.
The Body Tags
The <body> and </body> tags wrapped around the text tells you this is the “body” of the web page, where the content you want displayed in the browser goes.
Remember to Close Your Tags
You might have noticed that these tags come in pair. One of these tags is used to start the command to the web browser, and the other is used to end or close it. For example, when you use the <title> tag, you are telling the web browser, “Hey, this is the web page’s title here, pay attention!”. Now, you need to tell the web browser that you are done telling it the title of your page page. You use the </title> tag to say, “Ok, done telling you what the title is – move along!”
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HTML Basics
Posted by: | CommentsHyper Text Markup Language, or as you know it HTML, is the markup language for most web pages on the Internet.
Now, it is not exactly a language like English or Spanish, which we communicate with verbally. A markup language is a system for editing text in a way that changes how the text looks or how you interact with it. Where you use funny looking code to make one section of text look different than the other, the code in question is not seen by the end user. The server the web page is coming from, and the user’s browser come together to help mesh it together as something that is seen as visually appealing to the end user.
A Simple HTML Example
Here is an example of a web site written in HTML code:
<html> <body> <p>This is my first web site. I hope you enjoy it!</p> </body> </html>
Breaking Down the HTML Code
As you can see from the text above, this is a pretty simple example. You have the basic text of the web site, “This is my first web site. I hope you enjoy it!” with several HTML tags wrapped around it. The HTML tags are what give the text commands on how it should be interpreted by the browser.
- The <html> and </html> tags wrapped around the text tells you this is an HTML document.
- The <body> and </body> tags wrapped around the text tells you this is the “body” of the web page, where the content you want displayed in the browser goes.
- The <p> and </p> tags wrapped around the text tells you this should be formatted as a paragraph.
Here are some frequently asked questions somebody might have at this point.
How do you create an HTML file like this one? Best thing to use would be a plain text editor, such as Notepad. The reason for this, is you want the files in question to be saved with no extra markup information included.
How do I save the file as a HTML web page? You will want to save the file with a .html extension at the end. This will tell the web browser that this page is an HTML coded page, and should be read like one. As an example, I saved this file as “test.html”. The “test” name does not matter at this point, it could be anything. We will dive deeper into how to name your HTML files in a later tutorial.
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When Markup Languages Attack
Posted by: | CommentsYou of course know HTML, you may know some XML and SGML, and you figure there are probably a handful others out there that a few people use. If by “handful” you mean a few hundred, then yes, you are right. All of them serve real technical needs and a great many of them enjoy widespread support.
Some of the ideas behind some of these markup languages are, shall we say, a bit more interesting. As a break from some of our more serious articles, we figured you’d appreciate a trip down 21st century web trivia. Let’s see if you can guess what each of the acronyms below stands for before reading each section:
OFML
You’ll have a hard time with this one. Even though it was created in 1995, you still may have never before heard of Office Furniture Modeling Language. Its purpose is as it sounds. It was meant to be a language that accomplished a lot of the same type of modeling techniques used by CAD but which took into account specific needs of the office furniture industry. While it is still around today we were only able to find any significant use of it in Germany.
AIML
This one you might guess from the name. Yes, AIML does indeed stand for “Artificial Intelligence Markup Language.” Don’t worry, though, this language won’t bring about the end of the world just yet, though it may wind up in you getting fooled now and then: AIML exists primarily to aid in the development of natural language use by machines, and has shown some success with it.
AGML
You probably won’t find anything with as specific a use as AGML. You could also try all day and probably not guess what it stands for. Annotated Gel Markup Language exists solely to markup data obtained by a very specific chemical process called “two-dimensional gel electrophoresis.” To be fair we’re kind of cheating here: there’s not a lot of evidence yet that this markup language is being used by much of anyone. Then again, how much “everyone” for this is there?
WDTF
In terms of obscure uses WDTF might be a close second. This is another one you won’t guess if you’re not an Australian meteorologist. WDTF stands for Water Data Transfer Format, and was developed to transmit water data between private and public entities in Australia. As oddly specific as it sounds, it’s actually already in use in some areas.
Yes, all of you budding chefs have guessed right. You now have your own markup language. While so far it hasn’t caught on much, you have to admit that it’s original name used one of the coolest acronyms ever: Document Encoding and Structuring Specification for Electronic Recipe Transfer … DESSERT.
EML
We’ll end with one that somehow sounds a bit creepier than AIML. EML is designed to make more efficient the communication that goes on between user and machine. That may not seem so bad at first until its revealed to you exactly what this stands for: Emotion Markup Language.
We’d like to finish this by saying that now we’ve seen everything. However, knowing man’s desire for technological innovation whether or not it’s actually a good idea, we’ll leave the door open on this one. It’s not like we have much choice.