Microsoft Word

Chapter 3 — Introduction to HyperText Markup Language

Now you may be thinking that this is a laborious way of formatting text, and yes you’re right — there are easier ways of doing it, such as using HTML editors (such as HTML-Kit, which is covered in Chapter 5) or web design programs such as FrontPage. However, it will be useful for you to have a basic understanding of HTML so that you can more easily understand later chapters in this book, and because sometimes it’s convenient to make manual changes.

A common error is to forget the slash symbol in the closing tag, in which case the tag isn’t closed, and your text will more than likely appear corrupted.

During the course of this overview of HTML you’ll come across the term “attribute,” which is associated with various tags. You can think of an attribute as a piece of information that tells a tag how to do its job. For example, the tag <HR> places a horizontal line the full width of your page. If you add an attribute — for example, <HR width=”50%”> — the line would go only half way. The attribute width=”50%” has defined how the tag <HR> is rendered.

You can use both upper- and lowercase in your tags, although I recommend that you use lowercase for consistency. You should also place quotation marks around attributes — tags will generally still work if you haven’t included closing tags, but it is much better to stick to this convention to ensure maximum compatibility with present and future browsers.

Document Structure

Document structure doesn’t really apply to entering codes into MySpace, but it is useful to have an idea of how HTML works in a non-MySpace environment.

A regular web page is made up of two parts — the title and the body. The title contains the document’s name, while the body contains the actual content of the document. Typically, an HTML document might follow this kind of structure:

<html>

<head><title>HTML on MySpace</titlex/head>

<body>This is where the body of the document would go</body>

</html>

In a regular web page, whatever falls between <title> and </title> would appear in the title bar at the top of the browser.

In MySpace, because you’re entering HTML code into an existing web page, you don’t have to worry about a title. All of the code you will be entering will relate to the body of your profile.

Now we’re going to look at some specific text formatting commands that you’ll be able to use in your MySpace profile.

Blank lines are ignored in HTML, so if you want to leave blank lines to make your HTML code easier to understand, that’s fine. They will not appear in your profile.