Having spent several fun, though fairly arduous years, learning all about how to create for the Internet interesting web pages using HTML and a variety of other techniques, we realised that we had started communicating in a language that made little or no sense to our clients taking their first tentative steps in Cyberspace and wondering what all those funny looking brackets and coding were about. So this leads rather nicely in to our new section serialised here in 1984 for your monthly dose of techno normality
We were spending so much time explaining stuff to others, we were running out of time to do the fun, creative stuff ourselves. The answer was fairly obvious ... a book to bridge the gap. Something that would both entertain and educate. We have not restricted ourselves to simple non-techie information though certainly that was our starting point. If something came up which we ourselves wanted to learn about, we have added it to this book too. There should therefore be something for everyone interested in the art of web authoring and the nuts and bolts of getting their work up and running.
Lesson one: Ignore jargon.
The only thing you'll need to know is that WYSIWYG "What you see is what you get" is going to make your life a whole lot easier than fiddling around in all that murky hypertext mark-up language (HTML) with all those peculiar shaped brackets. What you need is an application that does it for you - fortunately WYSIWYG applications do just that. There are a large number of them available - the three I'd most recommend are VisualPage from Symantec, HomePage from Filemaker Inc. (formally Claris), and PageMill from Adobe. That's it. Job done. VisualPage is so easy to use you'll not even need the manual. I have never once opened the bonnet of my car - but I can fill it with petrol and get from A to B - that's what a WYSIWYG application does - gets your work onto the web without you having to worry about the techie stuff.
Having said that, I might as well fill the rest of this page with some techie stuff you can choose to ignore if you want. If you want to see what this page, for example looks like "under the bonnet" then all you need to do is lift the lid and this is how you'll do it:
With your browser (that's probably going to be either Netscape Communicator, or Microsoft Internet Explorer) you simply need to click up on your menu bar on the View menu - that will open a pop up menu list and on that list you'll see Page Source - if you click on that you'll see a new page open up - it'll start with a load of scary stuff that begins something like this:
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>HTML for Technophobes</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
<P>
<FONT SIZE="5">HTML for Technophobes. </FONT>
<BR>
<BR>
<B>Lesson one. Ignore jargon</B>.
<BR>
Don't panic - you can close that page again now.
95% of the stuff generated in these pages you can safely ignore and I won't even bore you by telling you what it is … if you didn't leave the room reeling with sudden nausea, the more discerning of you will notice that in amongst all that crud is some writing that looks exatly like the writing on this page. Aha! First light in the darkness. The blue colour by the way is only to make it easier to see what is techie stuff and what isn't. It's the brackets not the colour that makes it do exciting things.
For a piece of text to be a html file it simply has to have <HTML> in front of it and </HTML> at the end of it. If you do that your browser will know it must behave itself and show the page to you ignoring all the frightening stuff in brackets. Now we've gone this far you might as well know what some of these scary brackets can do for you.
This one <P> creates a new paragraph - which is really useful isn't it? Every time you put that into your page – bingo, a new pargraph will appear. And this one <BR> is a new line. It's a carriage return Baby that's all – it won't bite. This one <B> which makes your text <B>bold</B> is only slightly scarier because you have to remember that you can't have a <B> without also having a </B> In general, if you're in doubt, assume that what goes up must come down – think pairs. Your thingie in the bracket has gone and told your browser that it wants it to display the information in a special way. It'll go on displaying it that way until you tell it to stop - that's where the forward slash in the second of the pair comes in <B>BOLD</B>
… alright kids bedtime. We'll do images next month after I've brushed up on it.
