Intro To HTML

Professional Web page designers agree that GUI design tools, such as Microsoft's FrontPage, cannot be used as a substitute for knowing HTML. While these development tools can be used to publish simple pages, they cannot be used effectively when you need control over the rendering of your page. FrontPage also produces Web pages that are somewhat specific to Microsoft's browser and, therefore, not universal.

Design universal Web pages

There are substantial differences between the Netscape and Microsoft browsers. This results in many Web page authors having to choose sides in the battle between Netscape and Microsoft. Many authors design Web pages for one of the browsers and ignore the other.

This is a mistake because both browsers have substantial market share. If you don't ensure compatibility with both browsers, a large percentage of visitors to your site won't see what you intend them to see. If these visitors are potential customers, you may lose sales as a result of choosing sides in the browser war.

You need to design Web pages that are universal. You need to cater to users of both browsers. This means using only the common subset of HTML that works with both. This course will teach you how to code in HTML and how to design universal pages.

Workbook/Diskette

You'll receive a course workbook that clearly documents HTML tags and parameters and is rich with examples of HTML documents. You'll use this workbook after the course to refresh your memory on the finer points of HTML. The workbook includes a diskette that contains all of the HTML coding examples from the workbook. You'll likely modify and include many of these examples in your own Web pages.

Hands-On

You're welcome to bring your own computer to the course and follow along with the presentation and demonstrations by using the supplied diskette of examples. You need either the Netscape or Microsoft Web browser installed. You'll have time to experiment with making changes to the examples.

Course Outline

HTML Documents

File extensions

Tags and parameters

Document structure

Character entities and numeric references

HTML colors and RGB values

Physical versus logical tags

META tags and their uses

Coding to be robot-friendly

Controlling text

Headings

Paragraphs and breaks

Text attributes - bold, italics, strike-through

Text alignment - left, center, right

Fonts - size, face, color, alignment

Color

Background and foreground colors

HTML 3.2 standard colors

Color names and RGB values

Lists

Ordered and unordered lists

Controlling ordered list units

controlling unordered list bullets

Nesting lists

Tables

Simple and nested tables

Captions, headers and footers

Borders and ruling

Spanning rows and columns

Column groups

Wrapping cell contents

Background colors

Anchors

Anchoring text and images

Hyperlinks to the same or different documents

Named labels

Images

GIF and JPG

Sizing images

Positioning images

Using images within tables

Setting the transparent color

Interlaced and Animated GIFs

Image maps - server-side and client-side

Forms

GET and POST methods

SELECT lists

INPUT types

Buttons

Server-side processing

sending the form via email

Frames

FRAMESETs to divide the screen

Borders and backgrounds

How anchors work within and between frames

Andchors and scripts - onClick and onMouseOver