Computer Basics

2 - Applications:  Web Pages

What do you need?

• HTML editing program
• Graphics editing program
• Uploading program
• Browser
• Web space

HTML Editor:
You can use any plain text editor, like Notepad, to write the code. Or, you can use a specialty program for writing HTML pages. Such programs make it much easier to manage complex pages and large web sites. Also useful are programs that help you write scripts or that check your HTML code for errors.

Popular programs for writing HTML include Notepad, Microsoft FrontPage, Allaire's HomeSite, and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Graphics:
For the images on your web pages you need a graphics program that can save your images in GIF or JPG format. PNG format will work for newer browsers, but GIF and JPG work for all browsers.

MS Paint: Older versions of MS Paint, which comes with Windows, cannot save images in GIF, JPG or PNG formats.

Can your version?
Open MS Paint (Start menu | Run | type mspaint and click OK). Look in the Save As dialog at the file types: File | Save As | File type list. If the list includes GIF and JPG, you are ready to create and edit images for your web pages.

(If you do much with images, you will soon want a more advanced program than MSPaint!)

You might also want a scanner to scan photos and drawings. Collections of clip art come in very handy.

Uploading:
To move your new web pages and images to a web server, you need uploading software, such as an FTP program. HTML editors like FrontPage and Dreamweaver include uploading as a built-in feature.

Browser:
To view your web pages you need a browser, like Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Opera.

Web space:
You can view pages yourself that you save to your hard disk, but no one else can see them. You need access to space on a web server to share your work with others on the Web. Your ISP account, with which you connect to the Internet, may come with some web space. There are ad-based, free web hosting companies. Or you can purchase a web hosting account with a commercial hosting service.

HTML Code

When each logical part of a web page is marked, the browser will know how to display the contents in a way that makes sense for the particular display device and user.

Special code tags are used to mark all the parts of a web page. For example the text in an ordinary paragraph is written in between opening and closing tags like this:

<p>This is a paragraph</p>

Example

In the frame below is a simple web page. Click the link below it to view the source code for the page. Can you find the tags that define the two headings and the list items? How about a simple paragraph? What does the image tag contain? What line dictates the background image?

View source  View page

Learning more

Reading and analyzing pages you see on the Web is a good way to learn about writing web pages. You can view the source code for any page that you can view with your browser.

Try it with this page. From the Internet Explorer menu, choose View | Source.  The source code will open in a text editor. The code for this page is a lot more complex than the example above!

For a set of lessons on writing web pages, go to Working with the Web: HTML Basics

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Last updated: 09 Sep 2005