HTML and the Internet ... an introduction

Welcome to the wonderous world of web page programming and design. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language of the Internet.

There are certain rules you must follow with regards to syntax, semantics and variations in content that can make or break your career as a web page designer. With this course, you will learn to construct web pages from scratch using only a simple text editing program (Notepad.exe) on your home computer. Eventually, you may wish to use one of the many web page programs for creating HTML documents commercially available. It is our goal to teach you the basics of proper HTML writing and structure so that you will be able to "debug" potential errors in the automated code that these programs create. Your pages will become smaller in size (aiding in fast downloads to your final Internet customers) and the streamlining of same will assist you to follow an important Internet principle of KISS. (Keep it simple students!)

Once you have mastered the basics of web page writing through this basic course, you will be able to "view the source" of your favourite web pages on the Internet and learn how to make your web pages that much better.

This course will attempt to teach you good basic design for your web pages. As all of us are very different in our artistic likes and dislikes, your specific path will surely be different from the other students taking this course; don't worry, the Internet is full of variety.

The most important features of any web site are: layout and functionality. The "cleaner" your web pages look the longer your visitors will stay. The more links you have at any given site will surely hold your visitors attention but you can easily lose them very quickly if navigating your pages becomes difficult or obtuse in any way.

You will learn to quickly become "fluent" in the HTML Language after finishing the Basic Course. Remember, practice makes perfect! The flavour of this course is based on basic HTML levels with some references to the HTML 3.2 standard now used in Netscape 4.0 browsers and most Internet Explorer versions. Netscape 4.x browsers are the most widely used Internet surfing tools with Bill Gates' Internet Explorer following very closely behind. We will be concentrating solely with Netscape Communicator 4.5 in this course. Different browsers can and will display your pages in different ways - this is the very curse of most web page designers, one which we all share unfortunately. With some trial and error, you will learn how to best code your pages to be displayed as consistently as possible over a wide range of browsers used worldwide.

The Internet was started by the U.S. Military as a means of communicating effectively and safely using computers separated by vast distances. If one bank of computers went down due to a military strike or natural disaster, the remaining machines would still be able to communicate with one another. Because of the involvement of the major Universities in the U.S., the Internet has blossomed into the tool that it is today with over 50 million people connected worldwide and growly rapidly.

The Internet is a collection of computer networks the share digital information (HTML documents in the ASCII text format). This text "markup" language is specific to the Internet or the World Wide Web and is similar in nature to the "tags" that used to be used in older word processing programs like MicroSoft Word to "bold" text and set specific font sizes and formatting, etc.

To fully understand and appreciate how all this works in conjuction, you must understand the simple functionality of the Internet in technical terms. When you "launch" your web page browser program, and look for a certain web page, you are basically "calling" via the telephone the site in question and asking for the data on their server (main computer) to be "downloaded" over the phone lines to your own hard drive. As the data is received to your computer, it is "cached" (stored) as files (either as HTML documents and/or image files in the JPG/JPEG or GIF format). Your browser then "interpretes" this data and displays it accordingly to your monitor. If you want to enjoy "faster browsing" of websites, you would allocate more space to the total amount of "cache" on your hard drive. In layman's terms, make room for more files so you don't have to keep downloading this information from the telephone lines.

This entire course is designed to be run using "local files" on your hard drive versus downloading them from another server. At the end of this Basic Course, you will learn how to successfully "upload" files to another remote computer so that anyone surfing the Internet can enjoy the fruits of your labour.