PROGRAMMING FOR THE INTERNET: OUR BEGINNING

 

The background ideas behind the Internet were developed in the 1960s. (Google “Licklider” and “ARPANET” to get an idea.)  Today, we mainly are referring to the World Wide Web when we say “Internet.” The WWW was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.  We view pages on the WWW using a browser.  Webpages are created using hypertext markup language (HTML). Webpages typically end in “.htm” or “.html”, although there are other extensions as well.

 

Below is the outline of a basic webpage. Let's take a look.

 

SAMPLE OUTLINE OF AN HTML PAGE

 

<!--     
         Name: Mr. Merlis
         Date: 10/23/2018
         Description: This is an outline of a basic HTML page.
-->
 
<html>
 
<head>
 
   <title>Outline – I appear in the title bar!</title> 
 
</head>
 
<body> 
 
   <p>You can see me on the webpage! 
   </p>
 
   <h6>Mr. Merlis</h6>
 
</body> 
 
</html>

 

WHAT THE CODE ABOVE LOOKS LIKE IN A BROWSER

 

A CLOSER LOOK at our first Webpage

 

 

Anything between <!--   and   --> is a comment in an HTML file.  This means that it is not actually looked at by the browser, rather its purpose is to give information to someone working on the file or who may be reading the source code.

 

You should always put your name, the date, and a description of the page in a comment in a file.

 

<!--     
         Name: Mr. Merlis
         Date: 10/23/2018
         Description: This is an outline of a basic HTML page.
-->
 

 

Webpages contain (markup) tags.  These are keywords in HTML that tell the browser what to do.  They are NOT case-sensitive, which means it "doesn’t matter" if you capitalize them or not - it is generally preferred to write them in lowercase. 

 

Tags must always be enclosed inside of < and >.  Nearly all tags come in opening and closing pairs.  It should be fairly easy to see that the only difference between an opening tag and a closing tag is the placement of a / in the closing tag just before the tag name.

 
 

 

When you make a webpage, you must put all of its code between <html> and </html>. This indicates that the browser should consider everything here to be of the hypertext markup language.

 

Everything between <head> and </head> is information that does NOT appear on the actual webpage. This is where you put the title of your page as well as other code like Javascript or <meta> tags that help with search engines.

 
 
 
<html>
 
<head>
 
   <title>Outline – I appear in the title bar!</title> 
 
</head>

 

Everything between <body> and </body> is what appears on your webpage.  This is where all the fun is.

 
<body> 
 
   <p>You can see me on the webpage! 
   </p>
 
   <h6>Mr. Merlis</h6>
 
</body> 
 
</html>