Chapter 2

HTML

A fundamental component of the original conception of the World Wide Web

is that it should be a collaborative enterprise. The web was designed so that

everyone would be able to add content. To make this feasible, the language for

constructing web pages (HTML) was designed to be simple, powerful, and easy

for non computer specialist to master.

In this chapter we give an introduction to the design of static webpages

using HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),

and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). As you will see, these languages are

quite easy to master as they are each based on a few simple ideas.

We begin with HyperText Markup Language (HTML). In this section we

provide a sufficient introduction so that you will be able to design static web

pages using the most common markup elements. For more information you can

visit the official HTML website at http://www.w3c.org or peruse any of the

many HTML texts.

HTML is build upon one fundamental idea which is the notion of expressing

the layout for a web page using HTML elements. As we will see below there

are a few dozen basic elements which are used to express the basic layout of the

page including line breaks, headings, layout of images, tables, and lists.

2.1

Simple HTML elements

Simple HTML elements have the form

.....

where TAGNAME is the name of the tag. A complete list of the HTML 4.01

elements is available at the URL of the official source for HTML, the World

Wide Web Consortium:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/elements.html

27