In the book, "The Agony and the Ecstasy", I read that Michael Angelo dug up graves in order to study the human anatomy in all its gory manifestation. He used to hold the internal organs in his bare hands. He came up with masterpieces.

The same is true for any skill, here HTML. I do not recommend you exhume the dead to come up with good web pages, but it is necessary that you understand them inside out. You should know what tag does exactly what, how, and how it can be manipulated to do what you want to do.

We had concluded the previous section with the all pervasive tag: . This tag informs the reader (a browser or a word-processor, or anything that reads HTML) that the file being considered is a web page.

Let's see what step 4 has in store.

== Step 4: ==

Within tags, insert another tag so that your lines look like:







Within the head tag, we store all the information that we want the browser to read first before proceeding to read the rest of the stuff, for instance, the title of the page, information about the author, meta tags (some of the meta tags causes your page to be found when the user tries to find a page like yours, through his/her preferred search engine or directory, for instance, "Description" and "Keywords" meta tags), etc. For the time being, we'll have just the Title tag here, as right now we are in no hurry to be found by all and sundry.

Although it is not within the scope of this article to tutor you on how to be search engine friendly, it is recommended you choose the words of your title after careful scrutiny. Try to include in it the words that you think the surfer might type at the search engine prompt. The search engine guys recommend that if it is your company page, then put the name of your company there.



This is my first, hand-coded HTML page



If a tag is not going to contain many lines of code, we can have the opening and closing tags in the same line, for instance,

.....

instead of


.....


This applies to all the tags.

Clear till here? Now if you want to see how your page looks on your browser, load your browser, and in the URL window, type the complete path of your file, like

c:
ewfolderfirstpage.html

and press enter.

See nothing? Don't get alarmed, and don't think you've goofed up big somewhere. We haven't yet put anything in the code that should come up in the browser. Yes, on the browser's window title bar, you can view the text that you've put within .

>From now onwards, leave your browser open, and keep pressing the Refresh or Reload button to see the changes, when you make them. Just remember to save the modified file [File -> Save: In the text editor] before refreshing.

== Step 5: ==

Now we come to the body of the page. Modify your page so that it looks like:



This is my first, hand-coded HTML page






tag tells the browser that from now onwards, the actual content of the page will come into the picture.

We leave this section here because the last stage of our First Page course shouldn't have an abrupt break. In the concluding section we shall see how we can display simple text, hyperlinks and graphic files on our web page.

See you there then.

If you liked this lesson, please forward it to someone you feel would appreciate it.

Send your comments and feedback at amrit@Bytesworth.com



About the Author
Amrit Hallan is a freelance web designer. For all web site
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