111 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
111 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: The 3-minute HTML tutorial
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section: computing
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---
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As computer formats go, HTML is easy and logical. It's all just text
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that you can edit with any basic text editor, like `gedit` under Gnome, or
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notepad in Windows. Let's start out with an example. Say you have a
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sentence, and you want one word in it to be bold. That sentence would
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look like this:
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Guess which word is <b>bold</b>?
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As you may have guessed, the bold word in that sentence is "bold", in
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between `<b>` and `</b>` tags. The sentence will show up like so:
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> Guess which word is <b>bold</b>?
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You now know HTML, the rest is just learning the names of the tags.
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---
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Here's a slightly larger example:
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<title>My first web page</title>
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<h1>Welcome</h1>
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<p>
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Welcome to my <b>first ever</b> web page!
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It features:
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</p>
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<ul>
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<li>A title!</li>
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<li>A header!</li>
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<li>A paragraph!</li>
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<li>An unordered list!</li>
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</ul>
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What you end up with in the end is something like this:
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> <div style="background: #ddd; border: solid black 3px;">
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> <div style="background: #00A; color: white; width: 100%;">
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> My first web page - WoozWeb Browser
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> </div>
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> <h1 style="text-align: left;">Welcome</h1>
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> <p>
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> Welcome to my <b>first ever</b> web page!
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> It features:
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> </p>
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> <ul>
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> <li>A title!</li>
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> <li>A header!</li>
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> <li>A paragraph!</li>
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> <li>An unordered list!</li>
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> </ul>
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> </div>
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The part inside the `<title>` and the `</title>` is the title of your
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page: that's what goes in the window frame at the very top of your web
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browser window, above the menus and everything else.
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The stuff in between `<h1>` and `</h1>` is a "level-1 header". That
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means that it's the biggest header you can get. There are also h2, h3,
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h4, h5, and h6 headers, with h6 being the smallest.
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The stuff inside `<p>` and `</p>` is a paragraph. Since HTML treats
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spaces the same as line breaks, you need to use paragraph tags around
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each paragraph. Inside the example paragraph is our old friend bold.
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Then, there's `<ul>` and `</ul>`, an
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"unordered list" (as opposed to an ordered list, which would have a
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number by each item). Inside the list are four "list items", enclosed
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in `<li>` and `</li>`.
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----
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Now, for inline images:
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<p>
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This is an
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<img src="https://woozle.org/assets/images/yurt.png"
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alt="face"></img> image, and
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<a href="http://woozle.org/">this</a> is a link.
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</p>
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Which will show up like this:
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> <p>This is an <img src="https://woozle.org/assets/images/yurt.png"
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> alt="face" /> image, and
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> <a href="http://woozle.org/">this</a> is a link.
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The example above has an image tag, with two "attributes", "src" and
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"alt". The "src" attribute in an `<img>` tag gives the URL to a
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picture, and the "alt" attribute is the text that's displayed to people
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who can't see images (blind users, folks without graphics capabilities,
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or if there's a problem on your web server). The "alt" attribute is
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required, but you can set it to `""` if there's nothing appropriate for
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alternate text.
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Lastly, the link, enclosed inside of `<a>` and `</a>`. The "href"
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attribute gives the URL that the browser will go to if you click the
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link.
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---
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That's it for basic HTML, and it should be enough to get you started
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writing your own pages. So go write something! The best way to learn
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it is to try stuff out and see what it does. For more neat HTML tags,
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check out [HTML 3.2 by
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Examples](http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/HTML3.2/), which is what I used
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to learn HTML.
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