Getting Started >
A Very Concise Guide to HTML for FrontPage Users
Why do you need this? After all you bought FrontPage to avoid having to learn
this stuff. Well there is really no avoiding the fact that you will need to know
at least a little HTML eventually and it really does help to have a basic
understanding of it from the start.
This is not a HTML course, or even a
tutorial, it is a very brief look at the at a few aspects of HTML that will make
working with FrontPage a bit easier. If you want to learn more there are links
at the end to great free resources for learning online.
Part 1 - The Basics
What is HTML?
The letters stand for HyperText Markup Language.
The 'language' primarily consists of tags
(of which more later) that surround bits of text, or 'mark it up', and tell browsers
what the text should look like or what it should do.
The basic function of
FrontPage is to create these tags for you. So, when you tell FrontPage that you
want a piece of text to be bold, it surrounds that piece of text with the
appropriate tags to inform browsers that the text need to be shown as bold.
So, tell me more about these tags
The first thing is to remember is that tags enclose
text - that is
there must be a tag at the start of a block of text (the opening tag) and a
matching one at the end (the closing tag). The easiest way to learn about them
is to look at them - so lets take an example.
<b>This text is bold</b>
Here the opening tag - <b> - tells the browser "make the
text bold now please" and the closing tag - </b> - says
"End the bold now thank you"
All tags are written like this, with the opening tag consisting of the
brackets (the 'less than' and 'greater than' symbols) with some instruction in
it and the closing tag the same with the addition of a forward slash after the
first bracket. HTML is not case sensitive so
<b>This text is bold</b>
is the same as
<B>This text is
bold</B>
Both will appear as
"This text is bold"
That is about it with the tags - simple eh? Of course there are a myriad of
instructions you can included within the tags and that is where most of the
learning needs to be done to really know HTML. If you make it a habit to take
frequent looks at your page in HTML view as you create them you will quickly
become used to the different tags and what they do.
What is a HTML Document?
In order for browsers to recognise that a document is HTML, and thus capable
of being displayed, it needs certain minimum requirements. When you create a new
page in FrontPage all the basics you need are already there - so go do that and
then take a look at HTML view.
This is what you will see:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<title>New Page 2</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Let's take a closer look at what this all
means.
a. What is this document?
The very first tag is:
<html>
which tells the browser that this is, in fact, a HTML document. You will see
that this tag is 'closed' at the end of the page as </html>. Every HTML
document must be surrounded by these tags.
b. Tell me More
The next tag we see is this one:
<head>
which is closed a little further down as:
</head>
These tags delineate the 'head' of the document. Stuff in the head part of a HTML document does not
appear on the page when it is displayed in a browser, it is there to provide
information about the page to browsers or to search engines.
c. What sort of information?
Well first up there are the meta tags
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=windows-1252">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
Meta tags are special tags that give the browser, or in some cases search
engines, information about the page. In this case the first one identifies the
content of the document as html and the character set (charset) as English. The
next two identify the page as having been created by FrontPage. They are essentially advertising and they can be removed if you like.
One thing to note about meta tags is that there is no opening and closing
tags as they do not surround anything. All the information is contained within
the tag itself.
You have probably heard of the importance of including keyword and
description meta tags to your page. In part 2 of this article we will look at
how you do that.
d. What do you call this page?
The <title> and </title> tags name
the page. Whatever appears
between these tags will also appear in the title bar of the browser. View the
source of this page and look at the title tag and you will see that it is so.
Bear in mind that whatever you choose as your page title will be what appears in
search engine listings so name it carefully and clearly. Whatever you do do not
leave it as the default 'New Page 1' which is uninformative to say the least!
You can change the page title by simply typing in a new one in HTML view or
by doing File > Page Properties and typing in a new title in
the 'Title' box.
e. The main
event
The next tag on our page is the opening body tag:
<body>
immediately followed by the closing body tag:
</body>
Everything that you want to appear on your page will go between these tags.
To try it out go to normal view and type in a sentence or two. When you go back
to HTML view you will see that the stuff you added has been placed between these
tags.
If you have read this
far you may not yet be an expert on HTML but hopefully you
are beginning to have some idea about how it all works.
In Part II we will
take a closer look at tags and at adding meta tags to
your pages.
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