Sams Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours

Sams Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours

By Dick Oliver

What Is a Web Page?

Once upon a time, back when there weren't any footprints on the moon, some far-sighted folks decided to see whether they could connect several major computer networks together. I'll spare you the names and stories (there are plenty of both), but the eventual result was the "mother of all networks," which we call the Internet.

Until 1990, accessing information through the Internet was a rather technical affair. It was so hard, in fact, that even Ph.D.-holding physicists were often frustrated when trying to swap data. One such physicist, the now famous Tim Berners Lee, cooked up a way to easily cross-reference text on the Internet through "hypertext" links. This wasn't a new idea, but his simple Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) managed to thrive while more ambitious hypertext projects floundered.

Hypertext means text stored in electronic form with cross-reference links between pages.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a language for describing how pages of text, graphics, and other information are organized, formatted, and linked together.

By 1993, almost 100 computers throughout the world were equipped to serve up HTML pages. Those interlinked pages were dubbed the World Wide Web (WWW), and several Web browser programs had been written to allow people to view Web pages. Because of the popularity of the Web, a few programmers soon wrote Web browsers that could view graphics images along with the text on a Web page. One of these programmers was Marc Andressen; he went on to become rich and famous, selling one of the world's most popular Web browsers, Netscape Navigator.

Today, HTML pages are the standard interface to the Internet. They can include animated graphics, sound and video, complete interactive programs, and good old-fashioned text. Millions of Web pages are retrieved each day from thousands of Web server computers around the world.

The Web is on the verge of becoming a mass-market medium, as high-speed Internet connections through TV cables, modernized phone lines, and direct satellite feeds become commonplace. You can already browse the Web using a $300 box attached to your television instead of using your computer, and the cost of such devices is likely to fall sharply over the next few years.

Yet the Internet is no longer the only place you'll find HTML. Most private corporate networks (called intranets), now use HTML to provide business information to employees and clients. HTML is now the interface of choice for publishing presentations on CD-ROM and the new high-capacity digital versatile disk (DVD) format. Microsoft is even integrating HTML directly into the Windows operating system, allowing every storage folder in your computer to be associated with an HTML page and hypertext links to other folders and pages.

In short, HTML is everywhere. Fortunately, you're in the right place to find out how HTML Web pages work and how to create them.

Note

There are actually two flavors of HTML. One is called HTML 4 and the other is called XHTML 1. The X stands for eXtensible, and you'll find out in Hour 24 of this book why it isn't called HTML 5. You'll also find out what all this has to do with another new language called XML.

The most important thing to know from the outset is that all the examples in this book are compatible with both HTML 4 and XHTML 1 (as well as XML 1) and should be fully compatible with future versions of any software that interprets any Web page language.

If you have other books on creating Web pages, the example HTML in those books may look slightly different than what you see in this one. Even though the old-fashioned format shown in those books will work in the current crop of Web browsers, I strongly recommend that you use the more modern approach shown in this book; this will ensure that your pages remain usable as far into the future as possible.

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