What This Book Covers

This book breaks down the process of learning HTML into easily achievable modules. Each session should take about two hours to complete, but feel free to take longer if you need to:

• Friday Evening: Getting Oriented— Read background information on what HTML is and how it has evolved over time. Review what software tools you need to complete and preview this book's examples, as well as optional software tools that may be helpful. Download the example files to your hard drive that you will be using in the Saturday and Sunday sessions.

• Saturday Morning: Creating a Basic Web Page— Learn all of the basics you need to know to create a basic, but fully functional, Web page. Understand what elements, tags, and attributes are and how to use them. Use a simple text editor and your browser to create, edit, and preview HTML documents. Create top-level and other basic HTML elements, including a page title, level-one heading, text paragraphs, bold and italics, hypertext links, horizontal rules, line breaks, and an address block.

• Saturday Mid-Day: Creating a More Advanced Web Page— Learn how to create document menus that jump to sections in your page. Create bulleted and numbered lists, hypertext links, and link lists. Create superscipted footnote links. Insert inline images and special characters. Use relative URLs to link to files and images in multiple folders.

• Saturday Afternoon: Dressing Up Your Pages— Add a keyword list and a description that search engines can use to index your page. Use graphics, fonts, colors, and backgrounds to create more visually effective Web pages. Create floating images with text flowing around them. Create thumbnail image links. Set font sizes, colors, and faces. Display a background color or background image.

• Saturday Evening Bonus: Working with Tables— Define rows and columns, captions, column and row headings, and data cells. Set column widths, align cell contents, and span rows and columns. Define borders, set colors, and display background colors and images. Create indented icon link lists using tables.

• Sunday Morning: Working with Frames— Create two-column, two-row, combination row/column, and other framed page layouts. Create links in one frame that control the content in another frame. Create framed pages that are search-engine friendly.

• Sunday Mid-Day: Working with Forms— Create user-input forms using text boxes, radio buttons, check boxes, list menus, text area boxes, and submit and reset buttons.

• Sunday Afternoon: Working with Styles— Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to gain full control over the appearance of Web pages and sites. Set margins, padding, borders, colors, and backgrounds. Set any font size and change the font face for any element. Create dynamic rollover links. Create CSS-styled Web pages that are both backward- and forward-compatible.

• Sunday Evening Bonus: Creating Page Layouts— Create multi-column page layouts using tables and styles, including two-column and three-column layouts that feature mastheads, sidebar menus, and footers.

• Appendixes— Consult an HTML quick reference and special character chart. Create your own Web graphics. Add GIF animations, audio, inline video, hit counters, and site search forms. Learn how to find a Web host, register a domain name, and transfer your Web pages to the Web using FTP.