Free Simple HTML Tutorial

About this HTML Tutorial

If you want meta tags, complicated dynamic CSS, javascript and complex DHTML then you have undoubtedly come to the wrong place. If you want good basic simple HTML coding knowledge then you are in just the right place!

So what is HTML? Hyper Text Markup Language originated as a way to make plain text files more useful by being able to have clickable links (hyperlinks) that would take you from one place to another in the same document, or to a different document. It also allowed you to embed pictures and symbols into your document. HTML was originally written for scientific reports but after its adoptation as the standard for World Wide Web documents the language was extended and became more complex very rapidly. As I write this the web has just moved over to HTML2 and I will be using some HTML2 features to make this tutorial more simple!

Q: I suppose I need a special editor to write webpages dont I can you reccomend a good one?
A: No. HTML pages are simply text files.All you need is a text editor like notepad in windows or Gedit in Linux.

Q: I have an HTML Wysiwyg editor - why do I need to know about hand coding?
A: Well you dont... until something goes wrong, or until you want to copy some html from elsewhere. Its always worth remembering that most text editors do not optimise HTML code and so you may find you need to edit the file afterwards to remove any rubbish your code generator has added.

Q: So what is an HTML tag?
A: An html tag is the processing instruction that tells the browser how to process a part, or all, of the text file. An html file is simply a text document with the file extension .htm or .html and can be created in any text editor (like notepad in windoze or gedit in Linux). A tag always starts with a less than sign (<) and ends with a greater than sign (>). Tags come in two types, those which are self contained and those that need a second tag to close them. This second tag is needed (for example) to stop making text bold when you want to go back normal. There are hundreds of tags, some of them with lots of settings, however we will not be covering them all. Thankfully to build a good basic web page you do not need to know about very many.

Next: Page Structure

This site and content © 2009 Malcolm Grandis

Tutorial Contents

• Tutorial Introduction
• Page Structure
• Text Appearance
• Text Structure
• Hyperlinks
• Adding Images
• Tables
• *Image Maps

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