Introduction

So you've been surfing the Web, checking out everyone from the White House to the Atomic Café, from This Modern World to the Dilbert Zone, from Yahoo to Hoohoo. You keep saying to yourself, "Boy, that's cool. How did they do that?" Eventually, you start to wonder, "Okay, now how can I do that?"

Well, wonder no more. With this tutorial, you can pick up the basics of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) in a few short hours. Armed with that knowledge and access to a Web server, you can jump onto the bandwagon and put yourself on the Web. Trust us. It's cool.

What This Tutorial Is Intended To Do

This is not a complete coverage of the entirety of HTML -- it doesn't even cover all of HTML 2.0. This tutorial is intended as an introduction to HTML and nothing more. You will not know everything there is to know about HTML when you reach the end of the tutorial, but you will know enough to create a perfectly respectable Web page or five.

A note to those of you who already know HTML

This document is intended for people who have never written HTML before. It's for people who don't even know what an HTML tag looks like. Therefore, if you go ahead and read through this document, please don't send me irate email asking, "How come no mention of the BASE HREF tag, huh? What about the META tag, you loser?"

Such things are not included in this tutorial for a very good reason: no starting Web author needs to know them. I firmly believe that learning proceeds best by taking things one step at a time. Lay the foundation, then start adding walls--that sort of thing. I have sought to provide readers of this guide with everything they need to set up a basic, attractive, functional Web page. If you think of a better way to do it, let me know.

Incidentally, BASE HREF and META, along with interactive forms, are covered in Intermediate HTML, which is a sequel to this work.

A note to those of you who are ready to learn HTML

I have made every attempt to keep the terms and concepts in this tutorial as simple and straightforward as possible. At times, this may mean that I have glossed over or omitted certain peripheral issues which are not totally relevant to the discussion at hand. This means that you should try not to take everything you read in this tutorial as gospel. Also realize that as you keep learning HTML and the various quirks and oddities of the language, you will find out things which I didn't mention or I contradicted by implication.

Hopefully, the fact that you found out those oddities means that my tutorial got you started on the road to full Web publishing. If so, I've achieved what I set out to do. If you see any errors or are thoroughly confused by something I've written, let me know. I can't promise that I'll respond to everyone who emails me, but I will take note of well-reasoned criticisms and suggestions.

On Staying Current

One last point I'd like to make is this: the nature of HTML makes it nearly impossible for a document such as this one to stay completely up-to-date. I wrote this tutorial during May 1995, and I'm not sure how often I'll make revisions. Therefore, although I have tried to confine the tutorial to things which are not likely to change, there are no guarantees. A good rule of thumb is that any document which hasn't been updated in six months stands a good chance of being out of date.

This tutorial was last updated on: 31 March 1997

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Glossary
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