Creating Your First Page - Week 1

The anatomy of a web page is written in HTML: HyperText Markup Language. This language tells the Web browser how to format a specific page for a user, as well as linking different documents together. It is relatively simple to create, using a simple text editor with preview capability in any web browser on your computer- no internet connection required! However, the wide range of possibilities created by this simple file are almost unlimited, based on the creator's skill and knowledge of HTML tags and the correct order of using them.

HTML basics:
Container tags - Used mostly to format page elements that are "contained" between a beginning and ending tags.
Standalone tags - These tags insert something on the page, but do not affect other content.
Nesting tags - This is the practice of using a variety of tags one inside another to accomplish more complicated formatting, such as text that is both bold and italic.
Document tags - A minimum of three container tags establish a true HTML document. These are: "html," which tells the browser that the page is encoded in HTML; "head," which designates the header of the page that includes the title displayed in the title bar, search keywords, and a style sheet; and "body," which holds the actual content to be displayed by the page.

10(ish) most important tags:
Name: Type
Bold, italic, underline: Container
Paragraph: Container
Line Break: Standalone
Heading: Container
Horizontal Line: Standalone
Image: Standalone
Anchor: Container
Unordered list, list item: Container

Using this information, I created my first attempt at an HTML document, titled Under Construction. It is available from my USF account at: http://myweb.usf.edu/~mjosephs/underconstruction.html