Web features: the major parts of HTML

HTML, the language in which all Web pages are written, has been around since the mid-1990s. It's a big job to learn all the different major pieces of HTML; we recommend that you take it one piece at a time.

• Basic HTML takes care of most of the usual features like paragraphs, titles, numbered and bulleted lists, and so on. See `The Web's source language: basic HTML' for an online tutorial, and see the publication Summary of HTML 2.0. Also see the references and standards on the top Web construction help page.
• If you want more control of style features such as fonts, colors, and positioning, the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard is the best way to give you that control. You can set up central control of your page styles. For more information, see Styling your web pages with Cascading Style Sheets.
• See `How to view the HTML source for a web page' if you want to see how someone else's Web page is structured internally.
• To build tables in HTML, for arranging things in rows and columns, see the publication Tables in HTML: a tutorial and Summary of HTML 3.0 tables.
• Fill-out forms are a useful element in many Web pages. See HTML 2.0 extensions: fill-out forms and also The HTML Common Gateway Interface (CGI).
• If you want to use forms, or for any situation where you want the page to be created dynamically on demand with content that varies according to the reader's needs, see The HTML Common Gateway Interface (CGI).
• See `Using HTML Server Side Includes (SSI)' for more ways to generate page content dynamically. SSI features allow you to automatically include timestamps and page URLs as content, or insert content from other files, or even execute scripts that generate content each time a page is loaded.

John Shipman, tcc-doc@nmt.edu Last updated: 2004/05/15 22:48:33 UT URL: http://www.nmt.edu/tcc/help/html/features.html