Laboratory Exercise Week 3
The HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

In this tutorial you will be looking at the internal structure of HTML documents and creating your own HTML documents. In the past you may have looked at the source of some HTML documents (e.g. using Netscape's View->Document Source function). Looking at the source code of other documents is one way of learning HTML. You should be aware, however, that many documents are rather casual about adhering to `good practice' guidelines. Many Web browsers are quite tolerant of sloppy HTML, but there is no guarantee that in the future this should continue to be the case.

Look at the source of this page for a start.

A popular starting point for learning HTML is A Beginner's Guide to HTML (recommended for this laboratory exercise).

By the end of this session you should have created at least two HTML documents with the following characteristics:

• Use of paragraphs.
• Use of 2 or more levels of section headers.
• Use of highlighting (bold, italics, etc), but see remarks in the Beginner's Guide about Logical versus Physical Styles .
• Use of lists (ordered, unordered, etc).
• Appropriate use of both relative and absolute links between your documents.
• Use of links to external documents, perhaps in other countries.
• Use of internal links (to other parts of your document) commonly used for a document table of contents.
• Use of links to graphic images and alternate text, in case the image could not be found or is not loaded.

You should also be able to create your own home page.

Hints on editing HTML

Editing HTML can be performed with any text editor producing ordinary ASCII text (as you can see by looking at the source files of various documents). The emacs editor has a HTML mode, which is some help. There are various HTML editors around, at least some of which seem to be more trouble than they are worth. You can try out the version of SoftQuad's HoTMetaL available on the system as sqhm. The Netscape editor, under the menu File->Edit document, is easy to use for simple documents.

Other sources of information about HTML can be found on the Web. Look at

• the INFS2052 Resources page
• How to Create Web Services under the Netscape Help menu. For example, HTML Quick Reference is a useful summary of HTML.
• other elements to look for are listed below.

 chmod a+x filename

Look at Ramesh Sankaranarayana's ``student'' home page for example, at http://iwaki/~sanr1999/

You can develop an html file and check out its appearance before making it visible to the rest of the world, by using Netscape File->Open File to inspect its effect. When you are satisfied with its appearance, you can then make the file world readable.

Simple graphics

Here is a simple graphics example:

. Click on the ANU crest to see a slightly larger version.