Introduction HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the standard language for web pages. Once you know HTML, you can create your own web pages. Once you can create your own web pages, you can link them together to create your own web site. You can link your pages to other pages and other pages can link to yours. This does not involve smoke and mirrors, just HTML. Will it be difficult to learn something this powerful? No. Programmers have already written many different programs that can write HTML. No group of scientists has yet written a program telling a robot how to ride a bike. Learning HTML is easier than learning how to ride a bike; I promise you won't even skin your knee. Since programs exist to write HTML, why should you learn it? You can probably write better HTML than any program can. The program may not do exactly what you want it to do. If you know HTML you can modify (i.e., debug) the output from the program. It may enhance you value to your employer, and (but don't tell your boss)... It can be fun to create pages in HTML and (definitely don't tell your boss)... It is easy. This tutorial will teach you how to read and write HTML. You need to know how to read HTML at least as much as you need to know how to write it. Why? Because by reading the page source (i.e., by using the View Page Source function of your browser) you can learn neat tricks that other people have developed for doing things with HTML. For this tutorial you will need: a web browser (which you have if you are reading this). a text editor (I use WordPad on a Windows machine, or SimpleText on a Mac). disc space to store your work. a total of about four hours. It may not take you that long, or you may choose to spend more time; it is up to you. To actually publish your results on the web, you will need somewhere to host your pages and an FTP program. See the Appendices for more on this. HOME PAGE | LESSON 1 © Geo. McCalip 2001