Okay, now that you know how to make things bold and italic you're just itching to publish that half-finished mystery novel to the www... well the good news is that writing html documents is about as difficult as boiling water...
The real quick'n'dirty way is to create a new text document – let's call it "slacker.html" for the sake of argument – and type this on the first line:
<HTML>
Then type some random content, making sure to avoid the "<" and ">" characters (except as part of tags), as well as an "&" without a trailing space (the reason for this will become apparent later on, if I get that far...).
Now, on the last line type
</HTML>
See what you've done there? That's right, you've wrapped the entire content
of your document with the <HTML></HTML> tags, which,
oddly enough, tells the client's browser to interpret everything in between
as HTML rather than plain text or some other language like XML or what have
you. As a matter of fact, if you're phenomenally thrifty, you could leave out
the closing tag since the browser has to stop at the end of the file anyway.
Now, I did say that was the quick'n'dirty method... it certainly won't impress the W3C and it will very likely cause seasoned web designers to laugh hard enough to make Dr Pepper spray out of their noses. Do you care? I don't... but I'm lazy.
Okay, so here's how it should be done, if you're going to get all funny about it:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">Confessions of an HTML Slacker
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE></TITLE>
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Here's where your content goes...
</BODY>
</HTML>
It's a nightmare, right? Well, not really... what it is is valid HTML.
The first line tells the browser what dialect of HTML you're speaking. The
<HEAD></HEAD> tags are a place to put stuff that won't
actually display in the page, like the page title that shows up in the top
of most browsers' windows... ignore the <META... stuff, it's
not important at this stage in your career. See if you can guess what goes
between the <BODY></BODY> tags...
It's probably a good practice to copy and paste the above code into a template. Next lesson: things you can put in your BODY.