Before continuing with your journey, you should be familiar with some terminology.
The term for creating a Web page is designing . You do this by a process called coding. When you make changes to your page, you edit it. You, the creator, may be called anauthor or webmaster. Whenever you are coding your Web page, it is called a Web document. When this Web document is viewed by a Web browser (software to view the World Wide Web (WWW), it is called a Web page, where no one can remove any of your contents because they are embedded. Two or more Web pages that communicate with the other in some chronological, etc. order is called a Web site. Finally, the first page people see of your Web site is often referred to as the homepage, or simply HOME.
It's time to get technical, as if you didn't think this was technical enough. You will be using a computer language to code your site. It is called Hypertext Markup Language, simply because it is composed of markup tags or "tags". A tag contains an element, which is the command that tells the browser what to display. Each element may be altered to behave differently by assigning attributes, which are then set by specifying values. An attribute which equals itself is called a flag.Here is an example of a tag:
<img border="1">
Let's discuss the format, and how a tag must be typed. All elements are surrounded by carots (<>). The specific element above, IMG, inserts an image into the page. Notice that when an element appears as a tag, it is lowercased, but when given in converstaion or when called an element, or even naming it in a tag (such as the IMG tag), it is capitalized. Between the element and an attribute, leave ONLY one space. For an attribute to be set, you must type an "=" sign between the attribute and its value. Finally, make sure the value is double-quoted (quotes, ""). When more than one attribute can be set (which is almost always a possibility) there should be one space between te value of the preceding attribute and before the new attribute. This is shown below, as well as an example of a flag. Note that an attribute defined by its value is known as an attribute-value pair.
<img alt="Text" "border="1">
<hr noshade="noshade">
Note that attributes have no order.
Tags generally have both an open tag (or start tag) and a closed tag, (or end tag) such as the example below.
<b>Text</b>
Notice that closed tags have a forward slash (or slash, /) before the element.
Also, when I use the word text, I am referring to computer writing.