The first thing on your page must be the DOCTYPE statement - one of the few tags that doesn't come in a pair. A valid HTML document tells the browser what version of HTML is being used.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
is the most common, so we'll use that. "Strict" instead of "Transitional" is more picky about HTML code. Type (or copy and paste) this tag into your text editor.
Next, we tell the browser what the document is. Browsers can read other things beside web pages, such as Acrobat PDF files and word processing documents. We're creating a web page, so we'll tell the browser that.
<HTML> opening tag tells the browser to expect a web page.
</HTML> "/" before the tag name closes it. Type those two tags into your text editor.
The rest of our code will go between those two tags. Web pages are divided into two main parts - the head and the body. The head section gives browsers information about the page - it's title, description, keywords, and so on. The body contains the main content of the page.
Make sure your cursor is between your two HTML tags, and type your HEAD and TITLE tags - like this:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My First Web Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
Next comes our BODY. Again, the BODY tag is paired - it needs a close tag as well as an open tag, like this:
<BODY>
</BODY>
Enter these in your text editor. Now might be a good time to save your work, so you don't loose anything. Choose File, Save As, and give your page a name. Make sure you save it as an HTML file - something like "mypage.html". Save it so that you can find it easily - create a new folder in your "My Documents" folder and give it a name that you will remember.
Your BODY tag can be used to set any background colour or picture. Some common settings in the BODY tag are:
bgcolor=" "
If you don't want a white page, this will tell the browser what colour to use. There are two ways of describing colours - "hexadecimal", or by name. There are a lot of standard names that you can use - if you want a colour that falls between the named colours, you'll have to use the hexadecimal code.
Go To Page: 1 2
