Creating a Web site Hypertext Markup Language HTML How to

Creating a Web Site

CREATING A WEBSITE is as simple as typing a few lines and tapping the publish button. Creating a website is complicated; it requires a variety of skills and is relentless in the demands it places on the owner.

Both of these statements are true because websites can run the gamut from the simple check-me-out-dot-coms to Amazon.com. At the easy entry ramp you will find Google's Page Creator, "a free online tool that finally makes it easy for anyone to create and publish useful, attractive Web pages in just minutes." And at the other end of the runway? Go to Amazon.com and from the top toolbar select View and slide down to View Source. Click. What you're now looking at is the source code-an X ray of the Amazon home page as it appears today (it will change tomorrow). All those bracketed phrases and words are HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) tags instructing your browser about the text, fonts, colors, graphics, and photos. Well, most of them are HTML tags, mixed in among CSS style sheets and JavaScripts that also describe the way the page looks and works.

Although HTML looks like a programming language, it's actually a markup language. Programs solve problems and create processes. HTML tells your browser how to display the elements on a Web page with tags that parenthetically enclose the marked text. For instance, announces the opening of a paragraph that ends when the text reaches the closing tag .

You don't need a lot of HTML to create a page, nor do you need a special program. Just open NotePad or some other simple text utility and type. Your home page doesn't need to be any more than:

<html>

<body>Hey There!<img src= "images/myphoto.gif"></body>

</html>.

Save this file as home.html. In the same folder, create a folder called "images" and save a picture of yourself there and call it "myphoto." Drag the home file to your browser icon, and you'll see a Web page with your photo and the "Hey There!" greeting. Sure it's kind of lame, but it's a Web page in three tags, three lines.

Now it's at this point you might begin to sense what happened to the Web in the early years. Consider your page.

The text is jammed up against the side of your photo, so you add the break tag to get them unstuck. A little more info would help, so you enclose a short bio inside some paragraph tags . . .. How about some background color and a title in a large font? A frame around the bio? Some thematic background music? You get the idea.

HTML was designed by Tim BernersLee to create the structure of Web pages that, early on, were mostly text. But HTML could also be forced to take on design tasks, and, as more and more was demanded of the code, pages grew, downloads slowed, and sometimes failed. Jeffrey Veen explains, "The Web didn't respond very well to this onslaught. The cornerstones of digital design-usability, content, reuse, accessibility-buckled under the hubris of graphic artists."

Pages overloaded with repetitive, disconnected code would load slowly on individual machines as they combined to suck bandwidth across the entire Web. They would also deliver broken parts (lost links, pictures that wouldn't load) because the structure layer and the presentation layer were combined.

The solution required a standards commission, and one was formed by Berners-Lee at MIT in 1994. Called the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium), the international group designs protocols and standards to be used by content developers and browsers worldwide. Today the goal is to produce pages that have sound, economical HTML code that provides structure and cascading style sheets (CSS) that provide simple directions for entire sections of code rather than repeating these same orders over and over again throughout the document. Add JavaScripts, database-driven dynamic applications, and Flash, and you can have Web pages that will blink and go bump in the night and yet still load before tomorrow morning.

Code-it-yourself?

So is it still possible for someone (a nonprogrammer) to write and maintain his or her own Web page? Sure. Companies like Google and Yahoo! offer simple developer tools anyone can use. And for those with a more involved curiosity (or need for control), here are a few inexpensive ways to go.

First, the knowledge base. There are excellent professional programs that will let you design pages without ever looking at a line of code, but you really should have a basic understanding of how HTML works. I would recommend two excellent books from O'Reilly. Head First HTML has step-by-step short lessons, and the Web Design in a Nutshell is a solid reference work that combines full explanations with handy look-up indexes of HTML and CSS. You can read sample chapters of both books at www.oreilly.com.

Next, the software. The industry standard is Macromedia's Dreamweaver 8 (reviewed on page 56), and you can download a free trial version that will run for a month (www.macro media.com). At the opposite end of the cost field is the free Open Source Web development program Nvu (pronounced "new view"). Go to www.nvu.com to download a free copy for Windows, Mac, or Linux. In between these two is Microsoft's Front Page 2003-a good program that's easy to use but has an unfortunate tendency to create unwieldy code. Microsoft is planning to release a new Web design program, Expression, later this year.