HTML Help

(Latest Revision: 01/04/2000)

Help Getting Started with HTML

Dear Students --

I asked Brian Del Selva, who designs web pages (HTML documents) professionally, to give us a few tips on web authoring. He kindly wrote the message included here below.

Brian tells where to get information about publishing web pages for free. He also gives pointers to information that teach how to create web pages.

-- john sarraille

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Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 19:15:35 -0800 (PST)
From: B DelSelva <bdelsalv@toto.csustan.edu>
To: John Sarraille <john@ishi.csustan.edu>
Subject: Re: Web Authoring Book

John,

I started back in the good ol' days at

http://www.geocities.com

Geocities is a free web hosting service that has many HTML tutorials and allows you to construct web pages directly online or upload your own pages from your home computer through a web based ftp program. Last I checked you could even directly ftp using your favorite program (Cute FTP or Fetch).

http://www.tripod.com

Tripod is similar to Geocities, just started a little later. The biggest difference is the way your directory is accessed. All Geocities sites have a URL that looks like this:

http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Campus/4021

while Tripod you get this:

http://members.tripod.com/yourname

I suppose it's just a preference...

Most of my web education has been through the Wired Ventures Inc. family of web sites, but I think they are a little more advanced.

http://www.hotwired.com (main page)
http://www.webmonkey.com (how-to section, everything from basic HTML to dHTML, javascript, perl, cgi, shockwave, flash, photoshop, and much much more . . .)
http://www.webmonkey.com/guides (a great biased intro to the internet and the technology that is available on it)

the only advice I would have is:

1. don't spend money
- everything you will ever need to know about designing and hosting a web site is available online-free.
2. learn the code
- HTML has about 50 tags that you need to learn, and a good cheat sheet is all you need (http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/reference/)
- editors have their place, but they still can't offer the kind of control and speed that you get with hand-coding.
- years before editors existed, 12 year-olds were design web pages by hand, any college senior should be able to do the same, IF they are interested. If they aren't, buy/download an editor.
- I'm old- school, what can I say . . .

I hope all this helps.

-brian del selva

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bdelsalv@vega.csustan.edu
http://yahi.csustan.edu/~bdelsalv
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