Courses/Design & Technique-Essential Web Design/02

From Publication Station

A Web page

  • What is a web-page made of?
  • What files do I save when I save a web-page?

Tools to make a web page

  • HTML - the (markup) language
    • content is marked with different "values"; e.g: paragraph, bold, italic, heading title, etc
    • marking is done through tags that wrap the content
  • Browser - the interpreter of HTML, but also a debug and prototyping tool. (Read about what goes on behind the scenes in a Web browser [1])
  • Text editor - the tool to for designers/developers/programmers tooh write webpages (and programs)tot

essential HTML tags

Title Headers: <h1>,<h2>,<h3>,<h4>
Paragraph: <p>
Line break: <br />
italics: <i>
bold: <b>
hyper-links: <a>
image: <img />
comments: <!-- comments -->

http://publicationstation.wdka.hro.nl/go/kickoff/imgs/html.gif

  • In order to format content with tags you need to enter the content between an opening and closing tag. As in the following case:

<h1>My Title</h1>

    • <h1> is the opening tag
    • </h1> is the closing tag

At times you'll find self-closing tags which have no content inside them, like horizontal rulers


or line breaks <br /> or <img />


Exercise:

  • create the structure of your weblog and initial content about yourself - who you are, who you want, etc... , using these tags.
  • Find a new tag (in the HTML source of another page or using search ) and use it in your weblog

Homework: Continue adding content (text, imgs, links, divs, etc) to your weblog

See HTML Element Reference[2] for a exhaustive list of the HTML tags.


<a> anchor tag - hyperlinks

remote links: Normally, like in the example above, you use links to point users to other sites. Those are remote links

<a href="http://www.worm.org/">Worm website</a>
<br/>
<a href="http://tentrotterdam.nl/">tentrotterdam.nl</a>

Note: the href (address) of a link has to be a complete URL: beginning with http or https

local links: to links to other files/pages you have created, you use local links. They allow to move within your website.

Go to next <a href="next.html">Next</a> page.


<img> attributes:

<img src="http://www.wdka.nl/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2015/01/Project-Show_I1.jpeg" title="my pic" height="100px" width="200px"/>
<br/>
<img src="my-img.jpg" />
  • src: location of the image
  • title: title of the image
  • width
  • height

Get to know more and more about HTML tags


HTML skeleton

The previous tags only provided content formatting, yet to create any working web-page we need to always place the content inside a HTML page skeleton.

Skeleton.svg

Local file paths

Local links and image are some times in parent or child folders, different from the folder of your webpage.

To get an image to load or link to land on the right file, you have to indicate the correct path to them.

Folder structure.svg

Local file paths exercise

  • Add to your weblog local images and links.
  • Move the HTML file to a different folder.
  • Avoid broken images links


HTML <div> and span

<div> tag =

The div tag is essentially a square container for other content.

<div style="background:black; color:red; width:400px; height: 400px">                      
    <h1>Beautiful page</h1>                                                     
    <p>writing stuff                                                            
      <i>inside</i>                                                             
    </p>                                                                        
</div>


Abstract Browsing is a Chrome extension by Rafaël Rozendaal that transforms web pages into colored divs.


span tag

<div style="background:black; color:red; width:400px; height: 400px">                      
    <h1>Beautiful page</h1>                                                     
    <p>writing stuff                                                            
      <i>inside</i>                                                             
    </p>                                                                        
</div>


HTML UTF-8 Encoding

Use more than ASCII characters by telling to the browser your page uses UTF-8 encoding scheme.

UTF-8 can represent any character in the Unicode table, including emoji, Chinese, Arabic, Greek, etc characters.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
 <head>
          <meta charset="UTF-8" />
	  <title>😸</title>
</head>
<body>
	 <h1>😽 s page</h1>
</body>
</html>


  1. “Introduction to HTML” https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/Introduction.
  2. Mozilla Foundation. “HTML Element Reference,” n.d. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element.