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Writing Your First Document
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Touches of Color
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Writing Your First Document

In this lesson, you'll learn to create an HTML document....

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. HTML consists of a set of codes used to create Web pages. The codes control how the page is displayed by a web browser such as Netscape Navigator. A Web browser is viewing this HTML document (this page) right now.

The basic form of an HTML document looks like this. 

    <HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
main_part_of_document_goes_here
</BODY>
</HTML>

There are things you should notice here. The codes enclosed in brackets are called tags. Closing tags have a slash, while opening tags do not.

Most tags have an opening and closing tag. The area between these tags are called sections. Let's take a closer look at these tags.

<HTML>
These tags enclose the codes that make up the HTML document. An HTML document contains a head and a body, which is explained below.
<HEAD>
In this section, you can put a title and a description to the document. For now, let's focus on putting a title.
<TITLE> Between these tags, you can place the title of your document.
Example: <TITLE>Your Title Goes Here</TITLE>
<BODY>
What's displayed in your document goes in the BODY section. We'll explain later about that. For now, we'll discuss what goes inside the BODY tag. Within the BODY tag, you can control the colors to use in the HTML document. The form of the BODY tag is:
    <BODY BGCOLOR="#xxxxxx" text="#xxxxxx" link="#xxxxxx" vlink="#xxxxxx" alink="#xxxxxx">
To set the color for background color, text, link, active link, or visited link, substitute a hexadecimal color value for 'xxxxxx' in the sample above. This can be difficult if you don't know the color code. Fortunately I added a color section displaying common colors you can use for your web pages. Just click here if you need help.
BGCOLOR=#?????? Specifies the background color of the document.
Example:A document with a BODY tag like this: <BODY BGCOLOR=#ff0000> would have a red background color.
TEXT=#?????? Specifies color of your text.
Example:A document with a BODY tag like this: <BODY TEXT=#ff0000> would have red text.
LINK=#?????? Specifies the background color of the document.
Example:A document with a BODY tag like this: <BODY LINK=#ff0000> would have red links.
ALINK=#?????? Specifies the background color of the document.
Example:A document with a BODY tag like this: <BODY ALINK=#ff0000> would have a red background color.
VLINK=#?????? Specifies the background color of the document.
Example:A document with a BODY tag like this: <BODY VLINK=#ff0000> would have a red background color.

Now we have the basic framework of an HTML document. Now, continue on to the next lesson.

© 2001 Peter O.