HTML & WEB PAGE LAB SESSIONS

We'll cover the items in this document over two or three labs.

Review of the introductory lecture/lab

Parts of an HTML document:

Here's a great cheat-sheet on basic HTML codes (make sure your browser is set to a point size of 10 or 12 so both columns will be visible): HTML Example, by Christian Sandvig, a student at UC Davis.


Additional HTML codes & concepts

Other codes you probably won't need immediately (feel free to look these up and experiment):


Discussion of Web publishing issues and concepts

Creating a workspace on the Macintosh:

  1. TeachText, SimpleText & Word (problems of Word format, smart quotes, Macintosh-only characters like bullet and ellipsis)
  2. Use one window for the editor, one for the browser; switch back and forth with a mouse click.
  3. Note that same two-window technique works with Library databases. But be sure to save your work often:
  4. Know your audience and code for the browser(s) they use; at a university, that means LYNX
  5. Be aware of the difference in PC, Mac, Unix line breaks; without a conversion program, it may be messy to write a document on one machine and revise on another, although Netscape won't mind.

Home Pages as publishing

  • Blackie is not your typical Gen-X net surfer or your typical computer geek. Be yourself!
  • John December, a PhD student and Web Guru
  • C J Silverio rant on what a home page should or could be.
  • A counter rant, The Virtues of World Wide Web Inanity
  • Howard Rheingold and in particular the folks he has met on the road.

    Home Pages as art form

  • Who's Online? Portaits in Cyberspace (Art by some folks with faster graphics and bigger monitors, I think...)

    Home pages as a personal tool

  • If you're going to be browsing the web for fun and information, why not keep your notes and references in HTML so that you'll be able to save the hot spots with some comments, backtrack, review what you've seen, and point others to it at the same time?

    Practice at cutting and pasting links into your page

  • Open the "Steal this page" page and steal any of its links.
  • Open Bob's discussion page and swipe something from there.
  • Use Lycos or Infosearch to search on one or more of your Topic keywords. Find a couple of interesting sites and paste the URLs and a brief description into your page. (Get the codes from the Lycos page; then get some section headings or opening paragraph from the destination page. Use Macintosh copy and paste (command-c and command-v).


    Tutorials and guides

    Boutell's FAQ file is about the Web in general, with links to some HTML tutorials and advanced tools for creating and testing pages.

    NCSA's HTML Primer and This may be the same document or a new version.

    A chapter from the book, How To Teach Yourself Web Publishing in a Week

    Christian Sandvig's HTML Example in columns

    John December's HTML Demo and his Web Developer's Quick Reference

    This is an exhausting list of HTML tutorials

    Another HTML guide, from the Web's inventor.

    Finally, here's a "reverse" tutor -- when you see an HTML code in someone else's page and want to know what it does, try Webcom's Template.


    Back to the class schedule

    Bob Stepno, teaching assistant

    bob@stepno.com


    School of Journalism and Mass Communication

    The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


    Last revision: 10/22/95