You can preview documents in progress with NCSA Mosaic (and some other WWW browers). Open the document using the Open Local option under the File menu. Use the Filters, Directories, and Files fields to locate the document or enter the path and name of the document in the Name of Local Document to Open field. Press OK. If you see edits you want to make, enter them in the source file. Save the changes. Return to NCSA Mosaic and press the Reload button on the bottom menu. The edits are reflected in the on-screen display.
The minimal HTML document
Here is a barebones example of HTML:
____________________________________________________________________
<TITLE>The simplest HTML example</TITLE> <H1>This is a level one heading</H1> Welcome to the world of HTML. This is one paragraph.<P> And this is a second.<P>____________________________________________________________________ Click here to see the formatted version of the example.
HTML uses tags to tell the World Web viewer how to display the text. The above example uses
<TITLE>
tag (which has a correspondinging </TITLE>
tag), which specifies the title of the document,
<H1>
header tag (with corresponding </H1>
), and
<P>
end-of-paragraph tag.
<
), known as a ``less than'' symbol to mathematicians, followed by some text (called the
directive
) and closed by a right angular bracket (
>
). Tags are usually paired, e.g.
<H1>
and
</H1>
. The ending tag looks just like the starting tag except a slash (/) precedes the text within the brackets. In the example,
<H1>
tells the viewer to start formatting a top level heading;
</H1>
tells the viewer that the heading is complete.
The primary exception to the pairing rule is the
<P>
end-of-paragraph tag. There is no such thing as
</P>
.
Note:
HTML is
not
case senstive.
<title>
is completely equivalent to
<TITLE>
or
<TiTlE>
.
Not all tags are supported by all World Wide Web browsers. If a browser does not support a tag, it should just ignore it, though.
Titles
Every HTML document should have a title. A title is generally displayed separately from the document and is used primarily for document identification in other contexts (e.g., a WAIS search). Choose about half a dozen words that describe the document's purpose.
In NCSA Mosaic, the Document Title field is at the top of the screen just below the pulldown menus.
The directive for the title tag is
<title>
. The title generally goes on the first line of the document.
Headings
HTML has six levels of headings (numbered 1 through 6), with 1 being the most prominent. Headings are displayed in larger and/or bolder fonts than the normal body text. The first heading in each document should be tagged
<H1>
. The syntax of the heading tag is:
<Hy >Text of heading </Hy >where y is a number between 1 and 6 specifying the level of the heading.
For example, the coding for the ``Headings'' section heading above is
<H3>Headings</H3>Title versus first heading : In many documents (including this one), the first heading is identical to the title. For multi-part documents, the text of the first heading should be suitable for a reader who is already browsing related information (e.g., a chapter title), while the title tag should identify the node in a wider context (e.g., include both the book title and the chapter title).
Paragraphs
Unlike documents in most word processors, carriage returns and white space in HTML files aren't significant. Word wrapping can occur at any point in your source file, and multiple spaces are collapsed into a single space. Notice that in the barebones example, the first paragraph is coded as
Welcome to HTML. This is the first paragraph. <P>In the source file, there is a line break between the sentences. A Web browser ignores this line break and starts a new paragraph only when it reaches a
<P>
tag.
Important:
You must end each paragraph with
<P>
. The viewer ignores any indentations or blank lines in the source text. Without the
<P>
tags, the document becomes one large paragraph. HTML relies almost entirely on the tags for formatting instructions. (The exception is text tagged as ``preformatted,'' explained
below
.) For instance, the following would produce identical output as the first barebones HTML example:
________________________________________________________________________
<TITLE>The simplest HTML example</TITLE><H1>This is a level one heading</H1>Welcome to the world of HTML. This is one paragraph.<P>And this is a second.<P>________________________________________________________________________ However, to preserve readability in HTML files, headings should be on separate lines, and paragraphs should be separated by blank lines.
A
, which stands for anchor. To include anchors in your document:
<a
href="filename.html"
followed by a closing angle bracket: >
</A>
<a href="MaineStats.html">Maine</a>This entry makes ``Maine'' the hyperlink to the document MaineStats.html .
Uniform Resource Locator
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) refers to the format used by WWW documents to locate other files. A URL gives the type of resource being accessed (e.g., gopher, WAIS) and the path of the file. The format used is:
scheme ://host.domain [:port ]/path /filenamewhere scheme is one of:
file
- http
- gopher
- WAIS
news
or
telnet
, but these are used much less often than the above. The port number can generally be omitted from the URL.
For example if you wanted to insert a link to this primer, you would insert
<A HREF="http://www.math.human.nagoya-u.ac.jp/guide/html-guide/HTMLPrimer.html"> NCSA's HTML Primer</A>into your document. This would make the text ``NCSA's HTML Primer'' a hyperlink leading to this document. Refer to the Addressing document prepared by CERN for additional information about URLs. A Beginner's Guide to URLs is located on the NCSA Mosaic Help menu.
Anchors to Specific Sections in Other Documents
Anchors can also be used to move to a particular section in a document. Suppose you wish to set a link from document A and a specific section in document B. First you need to set up what is called a
named anchor
in document B. For example, to add an anchor named ``Jabberwocky" to document B, you would insert
Here's <A NAME="Jabberwocky">some text</a>.Now when you create the link in document A, you include not only the filename, but also the named anchor, separated by a hash mark(``#''):
This is my <A HREF="documentB.html#Jabberwocky">link</a>.Now clicking on the word ``link'' in document A would send the reader directly to the words ``some text'' in document B.
Note: The NCSA Mosaic Back button does not work for an anchor within a document because the Back button is designed to move to a previous document. Move back manually within the document using the scroll bar. (The Back button will return to the start of a hyperlink effective with Version 2.0 of NCSA Mosaic.)
Additional markup tags
The above is sufficient to produce simple HTML documents. For more complex documents, HTML also has tags for several types of lists, extended quotes, character formatting and other items, all described below.
Lists
HTML supports unnumbered, numbered, and descriptive lists. For list items, no paragraph separator is required. The tags for the items in the list terminate each list item.
Unnumbered Lists
<ul>
tag.
<li>
tag followed by the individual item. (Remember that no closing tag is needed.)
</ul>
tag.
<UL> <LI> apples <LI> bananas </UL>The output is:
Note that different viewers display an unordered list differently. A viewer might use bullets, filled circle