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intro html
There are several very basic things to understand about HTML, and if these sink in then most of it is pretty easy.
HTML consists of bits of text that you add to your writing. When a browser sees these bits of writing it stops 'showing' them and interprets them. For example <b> tells a browser to display what ever comes next as bold, and it will keep doing this until you tell the browser not to (</b>) will do this. They are just bits of text, just like the words you type, and that is all they are.
You can write web pages on any computer, whether it is on the Internet or not, and you can even look at these pages in a web browser (on the same computer). This lets you write and test web pages but until they're on a web server they are not on the Internet.
lan and net
When we write our web pages here we actually do two things at once. We log onto the server (like last semester), but now we log onto the web server from our accounts. This works in exactly the same way as ll the things you learnt about last semester (it is a folder on the desktop of whatever computer you're working at). The difference is that when you save something onto the web server it is, by definition, on the Internet. There is nothing extra you need to do.
However, this means several things:
- only save on the web server things you want on the web, if you don't want the world to be able to see it, save it in your account that lives in "all students", not in the account that lives in "web server".
- if you scan an image, or digitise video, then keep your originals on "all students" and only keep the ones you need on the web on the web server
- you can make as many folders as you wish in your account on the web server, work in these folders will become a part of that files URL.
- it is easy to confuse looking at your work via the RMIT network with looking at your work via the Internet. In both cases you look at it using Netscape, but only the second way is actually looking at it via the net. The simplest way to know which way you're viewing your work is to see what URL is being loaded by the browser. If it has http:// at the front then you're surfing, if it has file:// then you're looking at it via the RMIT network. This often makes no difference to anything, but it is always good to check your work via the Internet to make sure it works as intended, as you are the only person who can see your web pages via the RMIT network.
naming files
When you start writing pages to put on the web there are also some naming conventions that should be observed. These are needed because the web is a part of the internet, and so needs to standards that all different operating systems can interpret.
Web pages must end with a fullstop and then htm or html. Since we're on Macs and we have 31 characters for file names you should use .html (this is important for our web server so use .html and not .htm). So this page, for instance, is called (rather oddly) intro_html.html.
You should not have spaces in any file names on the web. This is because a blank space is actually a character, and while browsers are usually smart enough to send the right character it makes the address a mess. For example the url http://bowerbird.rmit.edu.au/adrian miles/my page.html would actually be:
http://bowerbird.rmit.edu.au/adrian%20miles/my%20page.html
To get round this use either a dash (-) or an underscore (_) to join names, but remember the .html at the end.
One last trick, all web servers have a name reserved so that if someone types a URL that doesn't end with a file name (for instance http://cs.art.rmit.edu.au) then that is the page sent. On our web server it is called index.html This means that if someone types in http://cs.art.rmit.edu.au/staff/adrian_miles then the web server looks to see if a file called index.html lives in the adrian_miles directory. If it does then that is sent, if it doesn't then an error message will be sent. This is nifty as it just lets you shorten your URL's. So to see the department homepage you could just type http://cs.art.rmit.edu.au, though http://cs.art.rmit.edu.au/index.html will do exactly the same thing.
your first web page
Rather than using a web authoring tool we're going to start our first pages using a very basic word processor. This is just to really emphasis that HTML are bits of text that you can type in. We will shortly start using a much more sophisticated bit of software, but this is good to begin with.
These are the steps you need to follow:
- make sure you have logged onto the web server
- make sure that Simpletext is running on your computer
- make sure that Netscape is running on your computer
- start writing whatever you want on your homepage (remember, the world can read this)
- add the basic tags to tell a web browser that it is a web page
- add some tags around your work to control formatting
- save it
- use your browser to look at it via the network
- use your to look at it via the Internet
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