Sarang's Incomplete and Probably Inaccurate Guide On How To Write HTML

DISCLAIMER

Not only don't I take responsibility for anything in this document, I've purposely thrown in a few mistakes just to annoy you. So, bleah!

NOTE

You may notice that the rest of this document (below the spiffy line), is not in HTML. That's because I've never really liked HTML, and never will. It's like French... a dorky foreign language that you will one day realize you never should have learned.

The concept behind HTML is that not only are people stupid, but they're also incredibly lazy, as well. Suppose a friend of yours (presuming you have friends, even though you spend time reading HTML guides) wants to hear the song "Three Little Pigs". You poke around a little, do some research, and call him (unless it's a her) back and say, "Good news.. I've found that the song is by "Green Jelly"". Your friend hems and haws, and says, "Well, that's HELPFUL, but... where can I get it?". So, you poke around a bit more (working your tail off for someone you don't like all that much to begin with...) and finally call them back and say, "You can get their CD from Rick's Records at 123 Maple Street" (Rick was a friend of the city planners). Now imagine your friend says, "Ummm... could you get it for me?". At this point, you slam the phone down, never speak to your friend again, and start hanging out with people who are not allergic to sunlight. BUT IF YOU'RE THE KIND OF PERSON WHO WRITES HTML, YOU BUY THE STINKIN' RECORD FOR YOUR FRIEND, TAKE IT TO HIS HOUSE, RUB HIS STINKIN' NOSE IN IT AND THEN KISS HIS ASS. THAT'S WHAT IT TAKES TO WRITE HTML! In HTML, you don't just tell someone about something... you actually point them directly to it. Most people start HTML programming by building a home page (although Alaskans use a "Nome page", while Italians prefer a "Rome page"). Your home page usually tells the world a little something about you (by "the world", I mean you, your friends, and maybe 2 or 3 other people who care). Now suppose there are three things you want people to see on your home page... a picture of your dog (mydog.gif), an essay about your pet monkey (monkey.txt), and the sound of your mom sneezing (momsneeze.au). You *could* put them all in one place, but this would be confusing, and defeat the purpose of HTML ("people are stupid and lazy"). So, instead you design a page which looks like this (only it's not inside an HTML guide):

See my ugly dog
Hear my mom sneeze
Click here to read about my pet monkey

Then, if someone wanted to see your dog, they would just click on the word "ugly" or "dog" (or, more likely, just call you up and say "I've already seen your stupid dog... he humped my leg last week"). How do you arrange this? Simply by creating a file called "index.shtml" in your WEB directory (if you don't know which directory is your WEB directory, ask your sysadmim [motto: Things would be so much easier if we didn't have to deal with these pesky users!]). The file would read something like this: <html> <title>Sarang's Home Page</title> <h1>Sarang's Home Page</h1> <ul> <li>See my <a href="mydog.gif">ugly dog</a> <li><a href="momsneeze.au">Hear </a> my mom sneeze <li><a href="monkey.txt"> Click here </a> to read about my pet monkey </ul> </html> Of course, yours will look a bit different, if, for example, your name isn't Sarang. Ok, let's go through that piece by piece. The <html> says "this is the beginning of an HTML document", which you would THINK is fairly obvious, but it has to be there. The <title> says "what follows is the title of this page", and the </title> means "that was the end of the title for this page". All HTML documents must have titles, otherwise they get jealous and ask for raises. The <h1> means "print the following text in really big type", and the </h1> means "ok, stop printing in really big type and return to normal type". It's customary to follow the TITLE of a document with the EXACT SAME TITLE enclosed in <h1> and </h1> (that is, <h1>TITLE</h1>). It is also customary to bang your head repeatedly in an attempt to understand WHY you have to repeat the title. OK, you now want to give people a list of choices, and <ul> means "start unordered list". If your target audience is particularly stupid, you might choose <ol> which means "ordered list"-- in this case, the items in your list will be numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, .. (well, you get the idea). I chose unordered list because over 50% of the Internet community can count to 3 (although not always in the correct order)... the </ul> that comes later on means "end of list", so you know when to stop counting. Now, <li> means "this is an item on the list". You have to put it there because HTML does not know anything about newlines. So, for example: <li>This is a list element is the same HTML as <li>This is a list element They will both look the same to anyone looking at your home page. This reflects the 2ndary HTML motto, "people who write HTML are pretty stupid too". Now, on to the list elements themselves. The words "see my" print normally, but the words between the <a href=SOMETHING> and </a> will print as a "link" (or, in the UK, a "sausage"). That means when people click on those special words, something will happen. In the first case, <a href="mydog.gif"> means people who click on the "link" will see a picture of your dog. In the second case, people will hear your Mom sneeze, and, in the third, they will read about your pet monkey. You can link in many kinds of things: pictures (GIF/JPEG format), music (AU/WAV format), movies (MPEG format), and regular text files. However, probably the most popular type of link is... A LINK TO ANOTHER HTML DOCUMENT! It spreads like a cancer... more and more HTML documents, taking over the earth... people clicking and clicking, going mad with lethargy... it's a plot! an e.. <SLAP!> OK, I'm better now. An example of a link to an HTML document would be: Return to <a href="index.html">here</a> Anyone who clicked on here would be taken to the file "index.shtml"... if they're already IN the file "index.shtml", this would be a fairly pointless link. Oh, the </html> stands for "this is the end of the HTML document", which exemplifies the teritary HTML motto, "the people who designed HTML are stupid, and sometimes actually unconscious". All the examples so far assumed that the files you "link" to are in the same directory as your home page (or the page you're linking from). Since this would severly limit the uselessness of HTML, it turns out most links are to non-local files. To link to any file at all, you need it's URL. If you don't know what a URL is, you should probably read a real guide on HTML, or, alternately, you could turn off the computer, and go lead a normal, productive life. If you wanted to link in David's Home Page, and you knew it was at "http://perky.com/~david/home.html", you would simply add: Go to <a href="http://perky.com/~david/home.html">David's Home Page</a> to your HTML document. By the way, if you ever see a really neatly-designed home page... first off, you're spending too much time on the WEB, but also... if you want to steal it, just use the "View Source" command from your browser. This will show you the ugly HTML (with all the "a href" and "<" thingies in it). There are other things you can do with HTML, slightly more complicated, but I won't be discussing them here, partly to annoy you, but mostly because I'll put them in part 2. However, I will at least mention what they are, so you can either pointlessly annoy someone about them, or wait until part 2 comes out (IF part 2 comes out). CLICKABLE PICTURES ------------------ Imagine someone looking at a picture of your two cats. Then, if they click on one cat, they get that cat's life story.... or a larger picture of that cat... or David's Home Page.... HTML allows you to do this using "map files", which let you choose a different "link" depending on where someone clicks. FORMS ----- Imagine someone filling out a questionairre and having the results mailed to you.... imagine someone voting in a survey automatically.... imagine watching the movie you want WHEN you... er, ummm... Anyhow, forms let people fill our information and then return it to you. More excitingly, if you're a good programmer (and eat all your veggies), you can actually take the information people give you, and run a program based on it. A particularly stupid example would be... you ask people to enter two numbers... and, voila, a few seconds later, you return to them the SUM of those two numbers! And it's all automatic! The computer did all the work! You didn't even have to be online! There are actually more impressive examples, including one that lets you move an actual video camera (Francis Ford Coppola is shaking!). OTHER STUFF ----------- There's a lot of other stuff you can put between the < and the > in HTML (a nice piece of Velveeta, for example), but this should be a good start-- if you're tempted to use something fancier, keep in mind that, in all probability, NO ONE WILL EVER SEE YOUR HOME PAGE :)

Last modified stardate: 20070609.123525

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