Creating Documents on the World Wide Web

Workshop Handouts

• How to make HTML Documents. A brief introduction to HTML codes.

• How to write HTML code for VOH. A shortened version of the above introduction to help with writing answers and anouncements for Virtual Office Hours.

• Common HTML tags. A listing of the most common HTML tags to show how they look in HTML and in a browser.

• Making a trial page. A simple page that demonstrates how to make an HTML document.

Other Resources for learning HTML

• Beginners Guide to HTML This is a great place to start. Highly recommended reading for anyone starting to write HTML.

• Composing Good HTMLThis is a more advanced and detailed discussion about writing HTML documents. This is highly recommended for anyone who has started writing HTML and they are ready for some more detail and to find out what they are doing that is not so good.

• Hypertext Style guide from WWW3 This guide has many useful suggestions about writing "good" HTML.

• HTML Terrorist's Handbook This is both funny and a nice listing of things to avoid doing.

• Frames TutorialIf you are really getting into this, learn about one of the latest HTML features and make really fancy pages. Note this is a Netscape extension that is not supported by all browsers. It has some significant advantages, but it is not easy and there are many pitfalls.

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  Applications for the Web.

  • Web-Edit. The HTML editor used for this workshop. There are lots of others out there. Some are freeware, some are shareware, some are commercial products with free trial periods (like this one). I selected webedit because at the time it was the only editor with a built in WYSIWIG viewer and it had the most complete set of HTML tags. I also like the spell checker, the table and form builder, the layout, and the online help.

  • The latest version of Netscape Netscape is the browser used for this workshop and by students in the campus computing labs. There are other browsers. Netscape is the most widely used and it has some very nice features. Make certain that you at least test your HTML documents on Netscape. It is a good idea to check it with one or two others. If you are a Windows-95 user, check out the built in HTML editor in Netscape Gold. This promises to make HTML much easier.

  • Screen Shoot. This is a small utility program that lets you make a bitmap image from a selected part of computer screen. This is useful for creating graphics.

  • Lview. This is a graphics program that will translate a variety of formats into JPEG and GIF files.

  • Quicktime Viewer. This is a windows version of the quicktime movie viewer from Apple.

  • Acrobat Adobe Acrobat is the most common electronic document format on the WWW. The viewer will let you look at any PDF files. The viewer is now freely distributable. This is a very efficient way to produce and distribute more complex documents.

  • ReplicaReplica is another electronic document format. You may download the viewer and install it as a helper application. I originally selected this format because the viewer was freely distributable.

  • WinZipThis is a windows compression utility. This program will allow you to compress and uncompress files from the WWW.

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    More Software for Creating HTML

    • Web-Edit (the HTML editor used for this workshop).

    • HTML Notepad This is a very simple application that works through the Windows Notepad. I recommend looking at this one if you are selecting an editor to use.

    • HTML Writer This is a freeware HTML editor that I used before switching to webedit for additional features.

    • Other HTML Editors This is an excellent list of other HTML editors that may be used to help create documents.

    • HTML ConvertersThere are converters available that will take a document in a specific format (like Word) and convert it into HTML. This has a great deal of potential, but I have not yet found one that I felt worked satisfactorily. If you just want to add bold and italic to regular paragraphs these seem to work fine. But they seem to make a mess out of more complicated documents. I would suggest using these with caution.

    • HTML Editors at YahooAnother listing of HTML editors.

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    This document was prepared by
    Scott Van Bramer
    Widener University
    Department of Chemistry
    svanbram@science.widener.edu
    Last Updated: Tuesday, May 14, 1996

    This page has been accessed times since 1/5 /96 .