Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Web Tutorial

I viewed the Basic HTML Tutorial screen cast. This video briefly explains how to create a basic web page using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language)using Notepad and your web browser. To begin, you need to tell the document you are using HTML. To do this you type the tag <html>, leave a few spaces and then type </html>. In the space between these two tags, you insert the head and body of the web page. Type <head>, leave a space and close it with </head>. Then you type <body> leave a few spaces and then type </body>. Next you insert the title between the head tags by using the tag <title> and ending it with </title>. The narrator typed "Hello world!" for his title. You can insert any title here by simply typing it between the <title> and </title>. Next you insert text into the body section of the web page. To create a new paragraph, insert the tag <p> to begin it and </p> to close it. You then insert the text between these two tags. The narrator typed "hello world, again!" for his body paragraph. You can also bold the text by inserting the tag <strong> and </strong> between the paragraph tags and insert the text between the strong tags. The narrator typed "This is a bold sentence" here. To italicize the text, replace strong tags with <em> and </em>. The narrator typed "This is an italicized sentence" here. You can also use both to create bold italicized text. To save your web page click "file" -> "Save As" -> and then save your document as a .html rather than a .txt. To preview your new web page, click and drag the saved .html document into your web browser.

The screen cast is not as helpful as a website or textbook which shows you exactly what the tags look like. In the screen cast, it is difficult to learn the tags because the narrator does not say the tags out loud and the video resolution was too poor to read it well. Instead, the narrator simply said "insert this tag" or "use this tag". It is not very helpful because it is difficult to see the tags and it does not tell you what is in the tag.

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