My Very First Web Page
350:465 Writing HTML for the Web, Fall 2001

1. A web page is a plain text file. It has no proprietary formatting (what makes bold bold in Microsoft Word) so it can be read by any browser on any platform with any hardware.
2. A web page can be read locally on your disk or globally on a Web server such as Rutgers Pegasus..
3. A web page contains only simple characters in the old fashioned typewriter range, such as A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and punctuation.
4. A web page file must have an .HTM or .HTML extension so the browser can interpret the HTML (hypertext markup language) encoding correctly.
5. All white space blocks in a Web page (spaces, tabs, returns, paragraph breaks) will be displayed by the browser as though they were collapsed into a single space character. Two things follow from this:
   • First, you must use code for line breaks <BR> or paragraph <P>divisions.
   • Second, you can freely use these invisible whitespace elements to make your code clearer to humans.
6. Most web page codes are angle bracketed container pairs with terms often similar to plain English, such as <BIG>this will be big. </BIG>. This is normal again. Or this will be <SMALL>small </SMALL>. This is normal again. Notice that the closing tag starts with a frontslash character. HTML tags are insensitive to case, but block capitals are used here for visbility,
7. If you want the browser to treat plain text as PREFORMATTED -- if it uses spaces or tabs to make columns or indents -- enclose it in a pair of <PRE>

      * * *
      * * *
      * * *
   

   </PRE> tags.
8. You can create a rudimentary text page with just these tags
   • BR and P
   • BIG, SMALL, and PRE in pairs
   • the HTM or .HTM extension.
   Type such a short file, save it, and view it in your browser.
9. If you were disappointed, what went wrong? Pairs must be typed exactly -- with angle brackets, not parentheses.