Very Basic HTML

Very Basic HTML--How to Make a Trivial Web Page

This is a very simple set of instructions for making web pages. There are many variation, details and interesting tidbits which I won't mention. For links to information on making fancier web pages and details of actually putting your pages up on the web check out the Web Builder's Page, http://www.carleton.edu/builders/.

Web pages are simply text files with special codes (called tags) which indicate the formatting and any special features (such as links to other pages). Let's assume you have some text you've written up in Word and would like to make a web page out of it. To make a web page out of it simply choose the Save As option in the File menu and choose Text Only from the "Save File Type As" menu. Save it with a name that has no spaces and ends in .html (or .htm if you're working under Windows). At this point your file is a web page. As proof you can open it up with Netscape. Simply choose the "Open File" option from the File menu in netscape and open up your newly created .html file. The first thing you'll notice is that all the paragraphs have run together and you've lost all your formatting. This is where the special tags come in.

Reopen your document in Word and place the characters <P> between each paragraph. If you now repeat the procedure of doing a Save As a Text Only file and opening it in netscape you should notice that your paragraphs are now separated.

The next critical step in making a web page is to include links to other places. This requires you to add another special tag to your document from within Word. If you want to make a link to www.carleton.edu for example insert the following line in your file at the location where you want the link:

The text "this is the link" is what appears in blue and acts as the "link" which can be clicked on. You can replace this text with whatever you like--whatever lies between the ">" and the "</a>" will appears as the text of the link. If you'd like to make a link to something besides www.carleton.edu (and hopefully you will) simply substitute the name of the site. If you're at a particular site within netscape you can find the name in the Location window at the top of the netscape window. You can copy and paste the name right from there into Word if you like.

Again, the trick here is to save your file in Word as a Text only file and then open it with netscape to see what your modifications and additions have done.

Well, that's one way to put together a very basic web page. Again, for more information about how to get the page you've created up on the web, or how to make a page that's a little fancier, check out the link above. To get you started here are a few example tags that might be useful:

Text between an <h1> tag and a </h1> tag will appear as a heading. Likewise, <h2> and </h2> mark off a lower level heading. As you might imagine there are <h3> and <h4> tags as well....
Where <p> puts in a paragraph break with a blank line, <br> will add just a line break with no blank line.
<hr> puts a horizontal line across the page.
<ul> and </ul> mark the beginning and end of an unordered list (like this one). Each item in the list is proceded by a <li> tag.
When viewing this page with netscape you can choose Document Source from the View menu to see the the tags that were used to create this page.

Happy web authoring.

Maintained by Sean Fox, sfox@carleton.edu
Last updated: Thursday, 31-Aug-2000 12:26:12 CDT