Oracle Web Applications: PL/SQL Developer's Intro

Chapter 5. HTML

Now that we’ve discussed WebDB and OAS, we’re ready to begin building applications. As you learned in Computer Science 101, user applications have a user interface, whether it’s a simple command line, like the one in DOS or Unix, or a full windowing system, like Windows or X. In this chapter you’ll learn how to use HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to create an interface that’s somewhere in between these two extremes.

This chapter, while by no means comprehensive, provides enough of an introduction to HTML to get you started building useful systems. We’ll begin with the basics of HTML programming, covering how to best start learning the language (if you don’t know it already) and how to use its tag- and attribute-based syntax. We’ll then take a whirlwind tour of HTML, examining most of the major tags you’ll use every day. You can find a listing of more complete reference works in Appendix A.

Programming in HTML

Your company’s human resources department may have its personnel policy on an internal web site. You can go to a main page and click on policies that cover various things HR types find important: dress codes, organization charts, inter-employee dating rules, and so on. Almost invariably, these documents have been converted from existing documents, such as Word or WordPerfect documents, using an editor like Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe PageMill, or Netscape Composer. While these tools are certainly useful, we must understand the actual HTML they generate before ...