Working with HTML

The way that your Web site looks is defined by HTML command tags stored in a Web page document. Each page of your site is contained within a separate Web page document. The documents can contain formatted text, forms, images, sound and video. The pages can linked to each other via hotwords that jump between pages or by hotspots on an image that have the same effect. In this chapter, I describe the most popular methods and standards used to create a Web page including a full description of the HTML language, all its extensions and add-ons. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to create complex Web pages that have just about every feature in a Web designer's palette! For information on how to program back-end applications that process requests from a Web page, see Chapter 14. For a complete listing of HTML commands, see Appendix B.

Web page production

Each Web page on your site can be made up of a several files:

• an HTML file that contains text, links to other pages and HTML formatting codes

• graphic files that contains images, background patterns, icons or photographs stored in GIF graphic file format (or the JPEG file format)

• data files to provide a searchable data source

• sound files

• video files

• 3D data files

• scripts that let you add functions to your Web pages

The only file you really need is a file that contains HTML codes. This contains the text you want to display...