Carleton College CS 107, Explorations in Computer Science

Assignment:

This lab exercise is intended to introduce you to HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and building web pages.

If you find yourself wondering what happens if you do this or that, by all means try it and see.

Have fun. Let me know if you have questions.

  1. Work through tutorials ... on Windows XP at ...

  2. After you're done with these tutorials, go to your personal folder and create a new subfolder called "WebPages". Open up Notepad via the Start menu, and enter in the following text. 

    	<html>
    	<head>
    	<title>A simple web page</title>
    	</head>

    	<body>
    	<h1>This is the heading</h1>

    	<p>This is a paragraph</p>

    	</body>
    	</html>

    Save this file in your WebPages folder, as a file called example.html.

    Now, launch Mozilla (the dragon icon your screen). Once Mozilla gets around to starting up, go to the File menu, select Open File, and find example.html. Select it, and see what happens.

  3. Read the tutorial at http://www.student.carleton.edu/builders/web_pages.html on creating your own web page.

  4. Copy your example.html file into your webpub folder. This will make your HTML file visible to anyone who wants to see it.

  5. Go back to Mozilla, and type and go to http://www.people.carleton.edu/~yourusername/ where "yourusername" should be replaced by your user name. You should see the file you just copied.

  6. Use Notepad to modify your copy of example.html, the version in your "WebPages" folder. Add a sentence or something. Make sure to save your changes.

    Now pay attention for a second: When you copy example.html to the webpub folder, you are making the file available to the entire Internet. Google and other web search tools will eventually find whatever you place in this folder. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you show some discretion about what you say on your web pages, and that you delete or move any files that you no longer want to be in the public space. Your personal folder and its subfolders are not accessible from the Internet, but all subfolders of webpub are.

  7. Again copy your file from WebPages to webpub.

  8. Go back to Mozilla and re-load the page.

As you work through the tutorial, experiment with each new tag by using this "Edit-Save-Copy-Reload" procedure. (Why do you think you need to copy the file from your WebPages folder to the webpub folder? We'll discuss this and many other questions in class.)

One last thing: as you work through the tutorial, you will see all the tags shown in capital letters (e.g. <HEAD>). For reasons that I will explain Friday, you should use lower case tags instead (<head>).

Now, on to the main event. Work through this HTML tutorial. It's an old one (written in 1995), but it's still an excellent introduction. Many thanks to Eric A. Meyer at Case Western Reserve University for making it freely available.

Finally, you should do the following: create a web page (or pages) on a subject of your choice. It should include at least one example of each of the following:

We'll talk about tables in class on Friday.

Name your main page weblab.html, and put it in your webpub folder. This will ensure that the URL http://www.people.carleton.edu/~yourusername/weblab.html will get me to your page.