Learning Web Design, 6th Edition

Part II. HTML for Structure

II

HTML for Structure

Chapter 4. Creating a Simple Page

4

Creating a Simple Page

HTML Overview

In This Chapter

An introduction to elements and attributes

Marking up a simple web page

The elements that provide document structure

Troubleshooting broken web pages

Part I, Getting Started, provided a general overview of the web design environment. Now that we’ve covered the Big Concepts, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and start creating a real web page. It will be an extremely simple page, but even the most complicated pages are based on the principles described here.

In this chapter, we’ll create a web page step-by-step so you can get a feel for what it’s like to mark up a document with HTML tags and apply styles. The exercises allow you to work along.

In this chapter you will:

• Get a feel for how markup works, including an understanding of elements and attributes
• See how browsers interpret HTML documents
• Learn how HTML documents are structured
• Get a first glimpse of a style sheet in action

Don’t worry about learning the specific text elements or style sheet rules at this point; we’ll get to those in the following chapters. For now, just pay attention to the process, the overall structure of the document, and the new terminology.

A Web Page, Step-by-Step

You got a look at an HTML document in Chapter 2, How the Web Works, but now you’ll get to create one yourself and play around with it in the browser. You’ll start with a page of raw ...