Part 1:

A Web Tutorial - Part 1: Getting Started

Terms to Know

The internet runs on alphabet soup (WWW HTTP HTML TCP/IP URL XML XLS ASP IE IIS) I hope to explain many of these in this and future tutorials - here are some to be getting on with:

Web: The World Wide Web (WWW) project, started by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, seeks to build a "distributed hypermedia system." In practice, the web is a vast collection of interconnected hypertext/hypermedia documents, spanning the world.
Hypertext is text with pointers to other text. Hypertext is read by 'browsers' which let you deal with the pointers in a transparent way -- select the pointer, and you are presented with the text that is pointed to.
Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext -- it is any medium with pointers to other media. This means that browsers might not display a text file, but might display images or sound or animations.
Browser: The software you are using to read this, for example.
The two commonest browsers for Windows PC's are Internet Explorer (from MicroSoft)
and Netscape's Navigator. On UNIX machines (where the Web actually started) there is Mosaic..
Web Server: The software that sent (downloaded) this web page to your Browser
HTML: HyperText Markup Language - HTML is a collection of browser-independent text with styles (indicated by markup tags) that define the various components of a World Wide Web document.
Web Page: A Web Page is an HTML document:
HTML Documents: HTML documents are plain-text (also known as ASCII) files.
Let me say that again HTML documents are plain-text files they can be created using any text editor and most word-processing software (If there is no built-in HTML support, remember to save your document as "text only with line breaks").This was created with Lotus WordPro...
There is also specialised Web development software available such as FrontPage or DreamWeaver.

For now, all you need is a simple text editor, here is one I prepared earlier:

<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> Your text goes here </BODY> </HTML>
Click this button to show your text in a

I have filled in the main HTML tags for you**. You will notice that they are mostly in pairs -
a 'start' tag e.g. <TITLE> and an 'end' tag <\TITLE>
Try this:
Type "My First Web Page" between the TITLE tags
and a message e.g. "Hello World of Web pages" in place of 'Your text goes here'
then click the 'New Browser Window' button -
Your page will appear for about ten seconds, with the HTML correctly 'rendered'. If you right-click on your page and select "View Source" from the drop-down menu, you can see the full 'unrendered' HTML.

** If you are using Internet Explorer you don't actually need any tags at all - it will render plain text correctly (you can try this in the editor window - select ALL the text and replace it with e.g. "Plain Text example" then click the button. You will need to reload the page if you want to get the empty tags back again).

Getting Your Files on a Server

To test your Web Pages properly you need access to a Web Server, so I have "shared" some directories on http://AndyD/SandBox - my PWS Server - 'SandBox' is american (the language of the web) for sandpit, somewhere you can play safely!
...more about that, and more about tags in the next tutorial. AndyD 8-)#

You can find out a lot more about HTML here

Trailer...

Next we Proudly Present Scripting.....

Try typing this in the Address box:

JavaScript: var str = 'Testing: '; for (i=1; i<4; i++) {str+= ' '; str+= i; alert(str)};