Teaching and Publishing in the World Wide Web

Continue to Limitations of WWW Documents
Go back to Constructing WWW Documents
Return to Contents

HTML DOCUMENTATION

Editing HTML is a throwback to the early days of word processing on mainframes. Just as I was happy to abandon GML/Script on a mainframe in favor of graphical word processing on a PC, I was delighted to abandon HTML editing in favor of graphical Web page editing using Microsoft FrontPage. Now more than a year has passed since I edited HTML source markup. But if I were really insistent on learning HTML today, I would start at my local bookstore and browse through the many shelves of HTML tutorial books until I found one that suited my style of learning.

When I began Web authoring in 1994, there were no books on HTML markup, and there were no WYSIWYG page editors. I learned the basic HTML tags for paragraphs and lists by reading the Windows Help file included with the pioneering Windows Web browser known as Cello. I also read the HTML tutorial that was included with Windows httpd.

Other sources for HTML markup documentation and tutorials on creating pages are readily available on the Web. A good, if perhaps overwhelming, starting point is the home page of the World Wide Web Consortium. Another good starting point with many links to WWW and HTML information is the Web Developer's Virtual Library.

More suitable for the beginner who wants to get just a taste of HTML markup are two publications that I found especially useful when I was beginning to create Web documents:

• "A Beginner's Guide to HTML" is a detailed introduction that takes advantage of hypertext linking within a single document file. If you have a slow connection to the Internet, you might want to use the multi-part version of this primer. You could also select the version in Adobe's PDF format that is readable with the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• "Introduction to HTML" is an extensive manual by Ian Graham. This paper takes full advantage of the hypertext features of WWW. The work is itself a complex hypertext document consisting of dozens of individual files with many hypertext links to one another. Mr. Graham's HTML Sourcebook, now in its third edition, is available from John Wiley and Sons (ISBN 0-471-17575-7).

Continue to Limitations of WWW Documents
Go back to Constructing WWW Documents
Return to Contents

Revised: December 28, 1999
Harry_M_Kriz , [hmkriz@vt.edu]