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HTML

essential

the least you need to know

to make excellent websites

some intelligence required

Gordon Charlton

Contents

Introduction:

The disciplines required to create a website, and whatEssential HTML provides the reader.

Essentials:

What a website is, what HTML is, and the stuff everyweb page has to have.

Coding:

Where to start, how to write HTML, what tools to use,why presentation is important and what nesting is.

Text:

Headlines, dividing lines and paragraphs,

bold

and

monospace

text, some special charactersand carriage returns.

Links:

Putting the hyper in hypertext, relative and absoluteURLs, leaping out of frames and email.

Colours:

A little Hex, colours that work well on the web, how tospecify a colour and a swatch.

Graphics:

Background images, adding pictures to a webpage andthe difference between photographs and drawings.

Formatting:

Rudimentary page layout, margins and lists.

Tables:

Presenting information in tabular form, and advanced page layout.

Testing:

How to test a web page, why browsers don’t complainand some common sources of problems.

Crib Sheet:

Essential HTML summarised.

Introduction

Creating a website involves three distinct disciplines, that of writer, designer and technician. Thefunction of the writer is to research the content of the website, to organise the fruits of his researchinto a coherent and logical structure and to document it in a manner appropriate to the subject.Good writing for the web is straight forward and direct. Content is what makes a websitesuccessful.The designer’s task it to present the information provided by the writer in the manner that bestcomplements it, and to supplement the written content of the website with visual information.While making a site with poor content look attractive will not make it a better site, a badly presented site will drive visitors away, no matter how good the content. Good design for the web issimple and functional, and subordinate to content.The technician’s rôle is the most fundamental – he builds the site using, primarily, the computer language HTML. A site with poor HTML will not realise the aims of the designer and will activelyreduce the number of visitors able to view it. A good designer will be aware of the limitations of HTML and a good technician will produce simple, neat code that works on the maximum number of browsers.HTML is a tool you need to use, and it is vast and potentially very daunting to the inexperienced.Yet it need not be so. Like writing and designing, coding HTML is best learned by practice andexperimentation, and by looking at content, design and coding with a critical eye, and learningwhat is good and what is bad. The best way to proceed with HTML is not to learn all of it: you willuse most of the language very infrequently, if at all. A very small subset of the language can fulfillthe majority of your requirements.Essential HTML is just that. It is a whistlestop tour of the parts of HTML that I would havelearned first, given the benefit of hindsight, and is, for the most part, devoid of any issuesconcerning standards or compatibility. It is enough to produce a simple but very respectablewebsite, and nothing more. For further reading on HTML and more esoteric aspects of the web Ilike the Visual Quickstart Guides by Peachpit Press for an easy introduction that does not treat thereader like an idiot, and for heavy-duty technical explanations and reference pretty much anything published by O’Reilly is good. (The green spined books with the drawing of an animal on thefront.) And, of course, there’s stuff to suit every taste on the web, if you look for it.But remember, it is not HTML that makes a site excel. It is content and design and codingtogether. Essential HTML only gives you the tools, it is up to you to practice using them. If youfind some of Essential HTML hard going, it is not you – it is the subject matter: HTML wasdevised by people who sometimes like you to do things in strange ways – wait until you see how tospecify the colour of a page!

Gordon Charlton