HTML Writing Resources

Prepared by:
Rosalind F. Dudden, MLS

Health Sciences Librarian
National Jewish Health
1400 Jackson Street, Denver, Colorado 80206
Voice: 303-398-1483 - FAX: 303-270-2149
E-Mail: duddenr@njc.org
URL: http://www.nationaljewish.org/news/med-lib/lib/index.aspx

Learn to write HTML by following these steps.

1. Keep both your word processor/editor and WWW browser open.
2. As you write or edit, you can bounce back between the word processor or editor and the browser.
3. Using a word processor, make the default for saving the file TEXT format, so that each time you save, the file is text as far as the browser is concerned.
4. Or use an HTML editor such as BBedit or Netscape Composer. Common WSYSIWYG site managers are Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Micro Soft's Front Page.
5. You do not have to close the file you are working on, as the browser just "views" it. Therefore, you won't get any complaints or crashes if you try to look at your "open" document.
6. As you make changes, SAVE the document (as text, if necessary) and then RELOAD in the browser.

If you forget either of these steps (you've made changes, but forgotten to save, or you've saved, but return to the browser and then not reloaded the document), then your changes will not appear. Even documents that you have previously opened in this session must be reloaded if you return to them after having made changes. If you document gets saved as a "Normal" word processing document, it also cannot be viewed by the browser. Use "Save as..." and save your document as "file type" "text only." Replace or over write the "Normal" document. So... to recap...

• You read the lesson in the tutorial on Netscape
• You use the tags from the lesson in your text document
• You Save (text only) your document
• You locate your document in the GO menu or use File --> Open File...
• Your re-load your document in Netscape and see if your tags worked
• If they work, you continue with your lesson using the browser GO menu
• If they didn't, you try to figure out why!
• Learn - Edit - Save - Reload - Look at Results ---- Learn - Edit - Save - Reload - etc.!

Start with these pages to learn step by step, Learn how HTML is structured and use these pages for your practice exercises.
Basics of HTML - Hypertext Markup Language - Part 1
Basics of HTML - Hypertext Markup Language - Part 2
You can also print out the "Beginners Guide" from NSCA listed below to have a paper copy to follow along with these exercises. The print our has more detail. I recommend typing your basic code at first to get used to what it does. Then at some point you can switch to using an HTML editor because it helps with marking up. With most of them, you highlight text, pull down a menu item, and your text is tagged. You can also use a word processor, save as HTML and "clean it up" and publish it. But Word makes pretty messy HTML. Primers on How to Actually Produce a PageAll primer assumes that you have:

• at least a passing knowledge of how to use Netscape or some other Web browser
• a general understanding of how Web servers and client browsers work
• access to a Web server for which you would like to produce HTML documents, or that you wish to produce HTML documents for personal use.

A Beginner's Guide to HTML

This is a good guide to print out and use as a print reference since it is on one HTML Document. It is 16 pages long. This is a primer for producing documents in HTML, the markup language used by the World Wide Web. Produced by: National Center for Supercomputing Applications / pubs@ncsa.uiuc.edu

HTML Tutorial. (Case Western Reserve University)

This is one of the popular hypertext tutorials. "This is not a complete coverage of the entirety of HTML -- it doesn't even cover all of HTML 2.0. This tutorial is intended as an introduction to HTML and nothing more. You will not know everything there is to know about HTML when you reach the end of the tutorial, but you will know enough to create a perfectly respectable Web page or five."

University of Toronto Instructional and Research Computing Group (UTIRC) HTML Instructional Pages

The University of Toronto Instructional and Research Computing Group (UTIRC) World Wide Web HTML instructional pages explain how to write good HTML documents and how to correctly use the different HTML document description elements, or tags.