Playing tag

That out of the way, let's have a look at a really simple web page, like the one shown in the screenshot. It's got all the important things that you might want to put on your own page, like a picture and text with different headings.

This is a simple home page, using only a very few basic commands - you don't need to be an HTML wizard to get good results

You can write a web page using almost any program that lets you save text files. In the second screen, we've used Notepad, which comes with Windows 3.1, and the text file is the HTML that produced the first screen. If you're using a Macintosh, you can use SimpleText instead.

You can use a simple editor like Notepad to write your web pages. This is the HTML that produced the first screen

There are two basic things to remember when you write an HTML document. The first is that almost all of the tags come in pairs. For instance, if you want to give your page a title, you would write

<title>Nigel's home page</title>

The second tag tells your Web browser that it's reached the end of the title section; you can write the names of the tags in capitals or small letters, or a mixture. It doesn't matter which. If you forget the end tag, then everything else in your document will be taken to be the title - if the results of your web page don't look right, check to make sure that you've remembered the end parts of your tags.

The second point to remember is that when a web browser reads your document, it automatically fits all the words to the width of the window, so if you want a new line in a particular place, you'll have to say so. There are special markers for things like new line and new paragraph, which don't have to appear in pairs; the new paragraph marker is <P>, which you can see in the screenshot at the end of each section of text.

A title and paragraphs aren't the only things that you might want on your page; it would look pretty boring if that's all you included. The first way of breaking up your page is by putting in headings to divide all the sections. For instance, the line

<h1>All about Nigel</h1>

will create a heading in large bold type.The number after the 'h' says how important the heading is; <h1> is the most important, and <h6> the least, so by choosing the appropriate level you can make it easy for people to find their way through your document.