National Center for Supercomputing Applications

A Beginner's Guide to HTML

This is a primer for producing documents in HTML, the markup language used by the World Wide Web. 

Acronym Expansion
What This Primer Doesn't Cover
Creating HTML Documents
    
    The Minimal HTML Document
    Basic Markup Tags
    
        Titles
        Headings
        Paragraphs
    
    Linking to Other Documents
    
        Relative Links Versus Absolute Pathnames
        Uniform Resource Locator
        Anchors to Specific Sections in Other Documents
        Anchors to Specific Sections Within the Current Document
    
Additional Markup Tags
    
    Lists
    
        Unnumbered Lists
        Numbered Lists
        Definition Lists
        Nested Lists
    
    Preformatted Text
    Extended Quotes
    Addresses
    
Character Formatting
    
    Physical Versus Logical: 
              Use Logical Tags When Possible
    
        Logical Styles
        Physical Styles
    
    Using Character Tags
    Special Characters
    
        Escape Sequences
        Forced Line Breaks
        Horizontal Rules
    
In-line Images
    
      Alternate Text for Viewers
              That Can't Display Images
    
External Images, Sounds, and Animations
Troubleshooting
    
    Avoid Overlapping Tags
    Embed Anchors and Character Tags,
              But Not Anything Else
    Check Your Links
    
A Longer Example
For More Information
    
    Fill-out Forms
    Style Guides
    Other Introductory Documents
    Additional References

National Center for Supercomputing Applications / pubs@ncsa.uiuc.edu
    
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The original of this document is available as

   http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html