HTML Coding

You can code HTML tags by hand, it really is quite simple. Various tools exist which will tag documents for you, but they tend to create redundant spaghetti code, making the document larger than it needs to be. Learning the tags themselves gives you a deeper understanding of the structure of markup languages than one could ever obtain by using an editor.

Much of the code on this site does not conform to any strict standard other than:

It has to be easily parsed by a human reader
It has to work in a standard browser
It has to involve the least amount of typing possible

For example, </p> tags are eschewed as being too much work, adding unnecessary visual clutter, and their absence does not seem to hamper IE and Netscape browsers from interpreting the page.

Coding by hand keeps your document lean. It enables you to structure the code for readability. It also gives you a better understanding of the underlying processes that go into marking up a document with tags, which is important to know if XML ends up conquering the world.

You can use vi to edit files on the server.

When learning to program HTML, there is one rule which everyone should follow, and that is: Steal from your neighbor. View the source. Copy and paste. Take whatever you want.

HTML documents are really just text documents that have tags added to them. And there are only a handful of HTML tags one needs to know to begin coding:

File Identification (Required)
<html> text </html>

Body Identification (Required)
<body> text </body>

Header
<h1> text </h1>

Line
<br> text </br>

Paragraph
<p> text </p>

Bold
<b> text </b>

Italic
<i> text </i>

Indented text
<blockquote> text </blockquote>

Line
<hr noshade>

Tables
<table>
<tr>
  <td> text </td>
  <td> text </td>
</tr>
<tr>
    <td> text </td>
    <td> text </td>
</tr>
</table>

Numbered list
<ol>
     <li> text
     <li> text
</ol>

Bullet list
<ul>
     <li> text
     <li> text
</ul>

Local File Link
<a href="filename">Description</a>

Internet Link (URL)
<a href="http://Internet_Address">Description</a>

Mail Link
<a href="mailto:MailAddress">Description</a>

Hyperlinks

To access local files, keep your URLs simple: just the file name.
For example, to link to the main index page from a file in the same directory, create the following link:
<a href="index.html">Home</a>

Imbed links unobtrusively within the text.

Author: Michael Pareene
Last Update: Michael Pareene