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Introduction to Netscape Composer

 

HTML 101

  
  HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the set of markup symbols or codes inserted in a file intended for display on a World Wide Web browser page. The markup tells the web browser how to display a web page's words and images for the user. Each individual markup code is referred to as an element (but many people also refer to it as a tag). Some elements come in pairs that indicate when some display effect is to begin and when it is to end.

HTML is a formal Recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is generally adhered to by the major browsers, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator, which also provide some additional non-standard codes. The current version of HTML is HTML 4.0. However, both Internet Explorer and Netscape implement some features differently and provide non-standard extensions. Web developers using the more advanced features of HTML 4 may have to design pages for both browsers and send out the appropriate version to a user. Significant features in HTML 4 are sometimes described in general as dynamic HTML. What is sometimes referred to as HTML 5 is an extensible form of HTML called Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML).

 
     
 

Creating an HTML document

  
  The first step in creating a new web page is to open a new page. First launch Netscape Composer. Next, click on:
File _
        |_ New
          |_ Composer Page

Before going any further I recommend saving your new document:
File _
        |_ SaveAs

When creating a new web page make sure the ‘Save as type:’ is ‘HTML File’. This will give your new web page an .htm or .html extension that will be recognizable by any web browser.

 
     
   
     
  Because the Internet is based on address and references all files, images, scripts and documents must be keep consistent locations. When designing a webpage a good practice is to keep all files related to the page within one directory. For example the main directory or root directory for 'HTML 101' is 'HTML'. Inside the directory 'HTML' are many other directories however all the contents of the directory 'HTML' will remain in that directory. If an image is inserted into an html document the code that supports that image looks like this:

<img src="file:///C:/HTML/images/Welcome.jpg" width="293" height="400">

When a browser loads a page with the image “Welcome.jpg” the path to the file is stated in the HTML. The path to “Welcome.jpg” is ‘C:/HTML/images/Welcome.jpg’. For the browser to find the image the file must be in the ‘images’ directory in the directory named ‘HTML’ all of which are located on the C: drive. If the Welcome.jpg image is moved out of the images directory and the webpage is not updated the browser will display the following image:

To avoid the missing image icon always keep your files in the same directory they were referenced to. In fact always keep each web site in it’s own directory