HTML feature
Bob Paton
Text, colour and graphics make up any page no matter the medium on which
it is published, whether its a vellum scroll or a mass produced paperback
novel. The only difference for web pages is the medium itself, there is no
physical representation of the document which is stored purely
electronically. In many ways web writers, like the early printers, have
managed to wrap their techniques in an air of mystery and introduced the
fear of programming inherent in many people. Web pages are, regardless of
content, simply documents saved with the extender *.htm, or in some cases
*.html, written with the control tags or markers visible in the source
document and meant to be viewed with a browser program. This tagging
system or Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is no different to the mark up
system used in every form of electronic tool for processing text of any
form and simply creates a description for the computer to display the page
in a manner which can be viewed more easily by the human eye. Believe it
or not although the World Wide Web in its present form is a relatively new
phenomena hypertext itself is no stranger to the Atari scene. Hypertext
documents are documents which allow the reader to use the programme to
jump from one hotspot or link to another either in another document or in
different place in the original document . The extra dimension added to
this by the Web is the ability to link documents that are not only held on
different computers but which may not even be on the same continent as the
original document.
Step 1 The tools for the job.
Although there are a great number of web editing programs for the PC and
Mac computers they have been rather slower to appear for the Atari range,
quality always takes a little longer, but they are not necessary to write
HTML documents. Any word processor or text editor capable of allowing the
user to change the extender to *.htm when the document is saved can be
used. Graphics are slightly different in that the primary formats used on
the web are not native to Atari's but again any art package capable of
saving in *.gif or *.jpg is ideal.
Step 2 A basic HTML document
Atari Computing Readers Index Page
Five lines to write a basic html document, not too difficult a task.
This is always the first command or tag on the page, it tells the
computer that it is dealing with an html document.
This area is used to provide further descriptive terms for the page
which remain invisible to the final viewer.
As its name suggests every page needs a title, preferably short
sharp and above all accurate. If your pages ever make it on the larger
databases of the Web it is the title of your opening page which is used to
categorise them.
This tag is different from those used previously in that it is a
closing tag, note the forward slash.
Closes the header area.
All information properly entered into this area forms what becomes
the visible section of the pages. This is closed with
The final tag on every page.
Unfortunately this page although a fully valid page in itself would be of
little use to a viewer as there is no actual information other than a
title in it.
Step 3 A little padding
As html does not generally accept pre-prepared text (with some exceptions)
it is neccesary to enter the control tags as the document is created. The
area is that section of your document where all of the information
you wish to be displayed should go. The first step as with the tabloid
press is to grab the readers attention and like all of the better pages a
snappy headline is a good starting point. The Headline tags within HTML
are to with being the largest and the smallest. Each
of these tags is closed with the appropriate partner.
For example Beginning HTML
As HTML is a relatively basic medium for the presentation of documents
there is less to clutter up a presentation than the average desktop
publishing program normally provides. Fonts are generally restricted to a
basic set with italics ... or bold ... ( also ...
) being used to highlight words or blocks of text.
For example This is bold and italics.
Previously prepared blocks of text can be incorporated into a web page by
the use of the command ...
however the text is then displayed
in an even more basic screen font and lacks any real presence. A more time
consuming, although more satisfying, way is to load the text into the
source of the page and then go through it line by line adding the tags to
create the page that was initially envisaged. The additional tags required
for this are
, indicating the end of a line and
indicating a new
paragraph. Lists can also be introduced with the use of menus,
or the for unordered lists.
The text can, as with a word processor, be aligned to the left, right
or centre using the tags or commands ,
(note the spelling) and
respectively.
Step 4 The links
The main advantage of a hypertext document is the ability to link to other
documents and this is done with html tags also referred to as anchor
references. There are no rules to state where a link must appear it can be
a word forming part of a sentence or the sentence itself. The tags
introduced for this function take the form ...
. For example Page 2. Links inserted in this
manner appear in the default colour of the browser program used to view
the pages and are generally set out to highlight them from the standard
text. Linked pages that have already been seen by the reader are also
highlighted in such a manner making it easier to see where the reader has
been and still may want to go.
Step 5 Colour and decorations.
Colour if used sparingly in web pages can be extremely effective although
there are certain default colours built into the browser programmes which
generally provide a grey background with black text and red or blue used
to highlight the links or hotspots although these can all be changed using
the appropriate tags.
Selecting colours for use is relatively simple if you can count from 00 to
FF (255) for each of the three primaries red blue and green and presenting
this within the tags as appropriate . For example
would give a page with a white background
(maximum red, green and blue ff = 255) and blue visited links (vlink).
The browser would still use its default value for active links. It is
important to remember the inverted commas and hash mark, if html finds a
mistake it simply ignores it and acts upon the last valid command. Whilst
this might appear rather forgiving it does tend to present pages in a
totally unpredictable fashion. Without importing graphics into the
document there is little than can be done to decorate the average html
page however horizontal lines can be used to break up a page with the
command
which would give a horizontal line across the whole page.
The line itself can also be resized with some slight alterations to the
basic tag. For example
. gives a line
half the width of the screen and aligned to the centre of the screen.
Although the actual width of the line can be set at an absolute value
measured in pixels it is prefereable to use relative sizes to allow for
different screen resolutions being used.
Although HTML is a very pedantic and unforgiving style of writing it has
been designed to be relatively straightforward in use and with these few
commands a basic set of web pages can be constructed with relative ease.
Finally no article concerning the Web would be complete without some
addresses where more information can be obtained. Try :
http://www.yahoo.com/yahoo/Computers/World_Wide_Web/HTML/
http://www.oneworld.wa.com/htmldev/devpage/dev-page.html
http://cbl.leeds.ac.uk/nikos/doc/repository.html
http://coney.gsfc.nasa.gov/www/sswg/candy_style.html
http://www.hprc.utoronto.ca/HTMLdocs/NewHTML.intro.html
** basic.gif **
Basic text layout on an html page
** Lists.gif **
The use of lists as links in html