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Practice
... Practice ... Practice...
The beauty of HTML is, that you can test it out on your own computer.
As we have seen, you can use Windows Notepad to create your html files
and use either Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator to view the results.
The best thing you can do to learn HTML is simply practice. Don't be
afraid to experiment. And don't get discouraged if it doesn't always
look the way you expect it.
Meta-Tags and Tags in the Head Section
of the HTML page.
Meta-Tags are special HTML tags that do not directly appear on the page.
They are place between the <head></head> tags. As we discussed
at the beginning of the tutorial. The HTML page consists of the Head
and the Body. The body section is what is displayed on the browser.
So Why are Meta-Tags and Head Tags Important?
Almost all search engines use two head tags to help index your page.
<title></title>, which we have already used, and <description></description>.
Some search engines use Meta-Tags such as <keyword> to help index
the page.
Title Tag-- We have seen that title is simply the title of the
page. This is what most search engines will use to generate the search
results title for your page. If you fail to create a title, you will
probably see the word "untitled" in the search engine results.
Description
Tag-- The description tag is a block of text that describes the
content of the page. The search engines often use this to generate a
description in the search results section. If the description tag is
missing, the search engine will usually use the first paragraph of your
web page to generate the page description. This, of course, can create
very unfortunate results.
Keywords--
Keywords where originally meant to help search engines index your web
pages. These have been so abused, that many search engines now ignore
them. Others only discount any keyword that does not also appear in
the page text.
Here is an example of what a head section would look like that contains
a page title, page description, and keywords.
<html>
<head>
<title>My Web Page</title>
<meta name="description" content="This is the
personal home page of Muffy the cat. Muffy is a very special cat.
This page tells you about Muffy's favorite past times. ">
<meta name="keywords" content="Cats, Muffy the
Cat, Catnip">
</head> |
Further
Study
This completes the tutorial. Although we covered a lot of ground, there
is a lot of information that we did not touch upon. Netscape 4 and above
and Internet Explorer versions 4 and above support Cascading Style Sheets.
Cascading Style Sheets allow you greater control over positioning and
text size on you web pages compared to tables and font tags. Use cascading
style sheet support is not consistent between browsers. It is better
in Explorer 5 and Netscape 6.
We did not cover frames. Frames allow you to create web pages that act
like groups of independent little windows. We also did not discuss Java
Script. Java Script allows you to do things like text roll-overs and
drop down menus. Java Script is well supported in both Netscape and
Explorer Versions 4 and above and is very easy to turn off for older
or text based browsers. Better web design software, such as Dreamweaver
and Go-Live and some image editing
programs such as Photoshop (version
5.5 and above) and Macromedia Fireworks
(version 3 and above) easily produce Javascript for you automatically.
If you want to check out a great text based HTML editor look at Homesite.
Homesite is an excellent tool
Macromedia Dreamweaver can also be used as a great learning tool for
HTML. Dreamweaver lets you view you page in What You See Is What You
Get mode and HTML at the same time. Highlight a section of the WYSIWYG
page and see the HTML highlighted immediately! If you want more material
to study, you can start by checking out our recommending reading lists
or web design and for
e-commerce.
There are several web sites that will give you more information on HTML
and web programming. They are:
www.devshed.com A great on-line
magazine that covers HTML, PHP, Perl, Javascript and other topics
www.w3.org/ This is the home of the
world-wide web consortium. They are the keepers of the HTML standard.
They are headed by Tim Berners Lee who created the world-wide-web and
has dedicated his career to keeping the web free and open.
We hope you have benefited from this tutorial . When you are ready to
host your site, we hope you will consider Acquired Knowledge Systems.
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