A brief introduction to HTML

Author and presenter: Simon Brooke.

The full text of this presentation is online at <URL: http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/bookshelf/courses/html/>

Last revised 11th October 2002

Changes to the presentation since your handouts were printed are highlighted like this.

Simon Brooke, 21 Main Street, Auchencairn, DG7 1QU, Scotland.

Introduction


What we're going to do today


What is HTML


About Text

Hand round copies of the text


About Markup


Why HTML is easy


In HTML, we markup by putting tags into text.


Let's do that [1] getting started


Let's do that [2] block level tags


Lets do that [3] inline tags


There's a little bit more to it than this


More about attributes: an example


At the beginning, some bureaucracy


HTML 4.01


XHTML 1.0


Right! Now you know how to markup text...


Pseudo WYSIWYG: Amaya

The instructions in the slides that follow have been tested using Amaya 5.1 on Linux and Amaya 6.1 on MS Windows. It's worth telling people that not all the features of Amaya work, but that the core ones do work well and if anything goes wrong and it crashes it's very good at not losing your work.


Marking up with Amaya


Linking with Amaya


Adding a picture with Amaya


Organising content [1] Lists


Organising content [2] Tables


Organising content [3] Rolling your own


'But it looks so boring...'


Adding stylesheets with Amaya


Why HTML is hard


Paper doesn't stretch


The Web does stretch...


... but most commercial Web pages don't

It's unfair to pick on BT. The only reason for doing so is that this course was originally written for BT people. Almost all commercial Web sites are at least this bad - many are worse. The images of the BT.com site were captured on the 11th October 2002.


More about scaling


More on disabled access


About Standards...


...and Monopolies


What happens when you try to open BT.com in Amaya?

At the time this course was written, BT.com was using a meta refresh header and a javascript based redirect on the front page with no explanation and no noscript clause. God knows why they aren't using a proper HTTP 302 response, but they aren't. See section 10.3.3 of RFC 2616.


Why do professional Web designers make such a mess of scaling?


Simon Brooke
Last modified: Mon Oct 14 10:04:23 BST 2002