Your job here is to learn the meanings of all the HTML tags on this page, and to do some experimentation with them.
This paragraph asks: where does the <title> tag's text appear in your browser?
This paragraph asks: what do the default inter-paragraph spacing and first line indentation look like in your browser?
And this one asks: how do newlines and indentations in the source code appear in the displayed version of the page?
Does this document have syntactically valid structure? Test it by visiting the W3C HTML validator
Are you using Chrome or Safari? Right-click on this page and select "Inspect" or "Inspect Element" to get a nice collection of developer tools. (Tools like this may be available on Firefox and IE and other browsers, but I only have Chrome and Safari installed on my computer so I can't easily check.) Feel free to play around with this to see what it shows you. We'll use these tools for debugging Javascript on Friday.
HTML entities allow you to display HTML special characters like <, >, and &.
They also allow you to represent any Unicode character with ASCII text, like this one: 😀. On the other hand, if your text editor is capable of saving arbitrary Unicode text and your HTML page has a suitable charset like UTF-8 (see the <meta> tag in the <head> section above), you can just paste the Unicode character into your source code directly, like this: 😀.
That's a tiny heading
Antlers? | Wings? | Noisy? | |
---|---|---|---|
Crow | No | Yes | Yes |
Moose | Yes | No | No |
Moth | No | Yes | No |
To make tables fancier, you'll need CSS. (We could add a "border" attribute to the table tag, but it's recommended that we use CSS instead.)
The World Wide Web Consortium (also known as W3C) is the standards organization that maintains the formal definition of HTML. The most up-to-date version of HTML is HTML5. The current version of CSS (also a standard of the W3C) is CSS3.
When you search for references for HTML and CSS details, the top results will often point you to w3schools.com. This organization has tons of documentation, and I find it quite useful. That said, there are many web developers who don't like w3schools very much. They often argue that the best source for reference and tutorial info for web development is the Mozilla Developer Network. For our purposes, I think either one will work fine for you, but I wanted to let you know that w3schools is not related to W3C, and that it's controversial to some degree.