HTML Guide

Creating Your Own Web Page


Web Page is created by writing Hypertext Markup Language(HTML). It is an easy language to learn because all it is is a set of instructions telling your computer how to display some text and images. The important thing to know about HTML is that it was not designed to make pages look pretty or exciting like most other programs that we use. Instead it was designed to get information across. As a result it is a very simple language that many people have tried to add on to so that they can create pretty and exciting web pages.

Although pretty and exciting web pages are fun it is important to remember that HTML is a rapidly growing language that changes from day to day. Because of this it is important to do the best you can to use only standard HTML tags (see below) when creating your web pages. Your pages can still be fun and exciting it just may take a little bit longer to learn the proper way of doing things. The trade off is your web site will look great to all users not just to those using the popular browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Getting Started: You can write your web page in any text editor. If you don't know what to use, try Notepad in Windows or Simpletext on a Macintosh. BBEdit is my favorite. You write your HTML in Notepad and you look at your web page in either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The Minimal HTML Document

Every HTML document should contain certain standard HTML tags. Each document consists of head and body text. The head contains the title, and the body contains the actual text that is made up of paragraphs, lists, and other elements. Browsers expect specific information because they are programmed according to HTML and SGML specifications.

Required elements are shown in this sample bare-bones document:
<html>
<head>
<TITLE>A Simple HTML Example</TITLE>
</head>
<body>
<H1>HTML is Easy To Learn</H1>
<P>Welcome to the world of HTML.
This is the first paragraph. While short it is
still a paragraph!</P>
<P>And this is the second paragraph.</P>
</body>
</html>

The required elements are the <html>, <head>, <title>, and <body> tags (and their corresponding end tags). Because you should include these tags in each file, you might want to create a template file with them. (Some browsers will format your HTML file correctly even if these tags are not included. But some browsers won't! So make sure to include them.)

An easy way to make a web page is to go to several websites like this list of Basic HTML editors on the Internet that help you create them using a program that is referred to as an editor. An editor let's you create a web page by writing the HTML code for you. In fact, you never see the code, only the web page itself as you create it.

Create your Canadian Math Trail submission using one of these web page editors and you'll have it looking exactly the way you want it to.