Basic html

This is not an HTML tutorial, but has pointers to places that might help out and a list of tags most used in REALLY simple web pages.

Consult the experts: The W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium creates and maintains   specifications for web technologies, including HTML and XHTML. They are the place to go for the authoritative    way it's supposed to be done. They have a    Getting Started with    HTML document that should help (and covers actually more than you    need to know for our purposes).

If you're curious and want to delve deeper, the  XHTML 1.0 Specification might be interesting for some geeks out there who wanna learn the reasoning behind stuff.

Some quick tags
&lt;html&gt; &lt;/html&gt;       It's HTML, right? &lt;head&gt; &lt;/head&gt;       This holds information like the title &lt;title&gt; &lt;/title&gt;     Your document needs a title

&lt;body&gt; &lt;/body&gt;       This holds the stuff that displays in the browser &lt;h1&gt; &lt;/h1&gt;           Heading 1; a big title. We pretty much just use H1 &lt;p&gt; &lt;/p&gt;             These hold paragraphs &lt;ul&gt; &lt;/ul&gt;           Start and end a bulleted (unordered) list

&lt;li&gt; &lt;/li&gt;           Start and end a list item within that list &lt;a href=""&gt; &lt;/a&gt;     It's the hyperlinks that make it HTML! &lt;em&gt; &lt;/em&gt;           For emphasis &lt;strong&gt; &lt;/strong&gt;   For stronger emphasis

&lt;code&gt; &lt;/code&gt;       Prints the segment in monospace; for something that says "type this" &lt;pre&gt; &lt;/pre&gt;         Monospaced font, preformatted; preserves whitespace, like this table &lt;small&gt; &lt;/small&gt;     This is mostly just used for the small print at the bottom &lt;br /&gt;               Note no end tag: a line break is not a container

&lt;!-- --&gt;             Comments only visible within the source code (for other maintainers)

Editing HTML
A text editor or text-based HTML editor, like bluefish, will be your tool. Find whichever one you're most comfortable with and wield it well.

Using tidy


will help you decipher what



will do. This is a good tool for finding those mistyped tags   that might make your beautifully written documentation show up    all wrong. It also makes the indentation consistent.

Links

 * The W3C
 * Getting Started with HTML