Learning to write a web page

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index.html and other 'standards'

You may have noticed that sometimes when you click on a hyperlink on the Internet somewhere, the resulting Internet address does not refer to a specific file (with .html extension) at all. That is because the Internet community has decided that the contents/index of a web site folder may be viewed by stopping at the slash after the folder name (example: 'C:/My Documents/OOSC-kk2/KKweb/' would display a list of all the files in the 'KKweb' folder).

If you do not want your readers to see a list of your files (you may have pictures or trial runs which you would not like viewed by everybody), there is a way round this. If you make a file called 'index.html' in your folder, this page will be displayed instead of a list of files. This index.html may contain anything you like, so it could just as well be your starting page, where you set out the contents of your website. Or it could be a little page where you say something like "hey, no peeking, this folder is not for public viewing". There are a few other filenames you can use for this 'starting' page:

Index.html 
index.htm 
Index.htm 
Default.html 
default.htm 
default.html 
Default.htm

Comments

Sometimes it is useful to include some text, which will not be displayed in the browser (for instance info on how and why you have written a script). You can achieve this by putting the characters <!-- at the beginning of your piece of non-display-text, and --> at the end. A comment like this can run over more than one line; you don't have to worry about carriage returns, line breaks, spaces, that sort of thing. Do remember, though, that these comments will end up in the Source, which can be viewed by your readers. So don't put things that are 'real' secrets in a comment...

<address>

The <address> tag is used to indicate the web page's whereabouts/owner/whateveryouwanttocallit. It is often used at the bottom of a web page. The text between <address> and </address> is automatically made italic. Many search engines use the address tag in their searches, so if your name is in there, it will be found more easily than many other words in your pages.

Other web resources

There are some excellent web courses on the Internet. You can use them to learn more, or just as a 'reference book' for all the tags which are available. Here are some you will definitely like:

• NCSA - A Beginner's Guide to HTML Home Page.
• Dave Raggett's Introduction to HTML, at w3.org.

Back to contents

What do we need? HTML and the .html file Tags Formatting Head and body
Size and shape Colour Colour table Colour wheels Pictures
Special characters Special characters table Hyperlinks Combining and nesting tags Lists
Tables Frames Style sheets Maps Forms Scripts Publicising (meta tags) Bits and pieces