| | | Quick start with HTML |
Most web browsers include an "edit" feature that will enable you to build a basic web page without knowing anything about HTML. That is a good way to get started quickly. Then you need to install your page in a place where the world can see it; there are some hints about how to do this on a Unix system.
To go further, you will probably need to learn something about the HTML language. Here are some concrete reasons to know how HTML works internally.
Knowing HTML, you can make minor changes to a World-Wide Web document with any text editor, not just with whatever program was used to create the document.
Many computer programs create mediocre or even incorrect HTML code, so you may need to modify the HTML output of a computer program by hand. The "Export to HTML" feature of Microsoft Word, for example, is notorious for producing HTML that displays correctly on Microsoft's World-Wide Web browser, but not on other browsers. (The main problem is that Microsoft uses the "windows-1252" character set, which is not well supported on most Unix platforms, so certain characters such as "smart quotation marks" are not properly interpreted by Unix web browsers.)
If you are going to create and maintain many linked HTML documents, you will probably use a computer program to produce the documents, and you will need to know HTML in order to customize the program. For example, the page you are reading belongs to a collection of pages produced by using hyperlatex with some customization.
The Math 696 course
pages were last modified April 5, 2005. | | | Quick start with HTML |