Writing Web Pages on Laidback.org
Writing basic web pages isn't all that hard. Here's a quick rundown on
what's needed. Once you have your laidback.org account sorted out then
you can start writing web pages. We'll start by looking at a basic one.
One of the best ways to write web pages is to write them on your own
machine and then transfer them to laidback.org. This way you can make
sure that they look good before you send them (plus you can spell check).
Once a web page is ready to send to laidback.org then have a look at the
"Web Pages on Laidback.org" help sheet.
Let us begin ...
The easiest way of writing a web page is to get something else to do it!
So, if you have a file such as a LaTeX file that you want to put on the
web, then there is a program called
latex2html
. Not so surprisingly it converts the LaTeX text to html and any figures
or math stuff to image files. Many other formats of files have programs
that can convert files of one format to html. HTML is not a mystical
language, all it says it where and how you want the page to look
like. All you need to create or edit html is a basic text editor.
OK, lets have a look at this example page.
Hello
Hello, my name is Alice and I like to do origami. Here is a picture of a
box I made. It's made out of lots of pieces all slotted together. You
could make lots of them and make a mobile. The best paper for doing
origami with is the small square-like origami paper. In England it's
really expensive but in Japan it's really cheap. I also found some in
the van gough museum in Amsterdam. I guess there just isn't the market
for it here. Shame really but that's how it goes.
|
So, you see how the browser has made up this page (where and how things
are). Well it's only done that because we have told it to do that. Let's
have a look at the source html for that page.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My page, by Alice</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<CENTER>
<H1>Hello</H1>
</CENTER>
<IMG SRC="/images/c_box.gif" ALIGN=right><BR>
Hello, my name is Alice and I like to do origami. Here is a picture of a
box I made. It's made out of lots of pieces all slotted together. You
could make lots of them and make a mobile. The best paper for doing
origami with is the small square-like origami paper. In England it's
really expensive but in Japan it's really cheap. I also found some in
the van gough museum in Amsterdam. I guess there just isn't the market
for it here. Shame really but that's how it goes.
</BODY>
</HTML>
The first thing to notice is the funny <HTML> thing at the top.
That's a "tag", something that tells the browser how to show your page.
The <HTML> tag tells the browser that what's coming is html
(actually most browsers don't need this anymore but it doesn't do any
harm). As you can see, at the bottom of the page there is another tag
that looks very similar to the first one: </HTML>. This kind of
closes the tag, so anything in between these two tags is html.
There are all kinds of tags for different things, here are just a few:
<H1>Level one Heading
</H1>
This is a level one heading, basically it's normal text but in a bigger
font. Usually used for headings.
<CENTER>
Center</CENTER>
Center tag. This basically makes everything inside the tag get displayed
in the center of the page.
<IMG SRC="/images/c_box.gif">
This will put an image on your page, with the source of the image to the
file you give it. In this case the file that will be displayed is
"/images/c_box.gif".
You may have noticed that there is a head section and a body section to
the page. That is all about where you put things. In the head tag there
is a tag for "title". In there is information that will go in the very
top bar of the web browser. Have a look now, it should say "Laidback Web
Pages". That's because the title tag for this page said that.
Other sources of reference
- w3.org - the offcial home of HTML.
- sage words from Joel Rowbottom.
If you have any trouble writing web pages or want suggestions then
email
webmaster@laidback.org and someone will try and help...