Publish Web Pages at UVM:

Creating HTML Files (Web Documents)

Web documents are created by inserting special tags into plain text documents and naming the resulting files with the extension .html. You can create these files using any word processor, text editor, or even special HTML editing programs.

Using an HTML editor

An easy way to create web pages is to use a web editor. These range from the simple, but free, editor that comes with Netscape, Netscape Composer, to the complex full-site editors like FrontPage, Adobe GoLive, and Dreamweaver. Let's look at an example from Composer:

Composer allows you to type the document in a way similar to a word processor. You can select text and format it, you can insert links by clicking on the Link tool and typing in the address of the page you wish to link to, and you can insert images, tables, etc. It also has a spell checker.

To use Composer, open Netscape, then go to the menu items: Communicator: Composer.

Using a text editor (typing raw HTML)

You can also create or edit your web documents with a text editor like NotePad or WordPad.

As you type your text, you must enclose it in HTML tags that tell the browser how to display your text.

HTML tags are enclosed in angle brackets (<>). They can be in upper, lower, or mixed case. Tags work in pairs. The opening tag starts a feature and the closing tag ends it. For example, <H1> begins a large heading and </H1> ends it. Notice that the slash signifies this is an ending tag. Here's the same example from above shown in raw HTML as created in WordPad:

Image of an html document displaying tags

Image of an html document displaying tags

To learn more about HTML tags and how to use them, see the:
Barebones Guide by Kevin Werbach

Go to the next step in the Web Publishing CYCLE or to the beginning of any these tutorials:

Copyright by
Hope Greenberg (Hope.Greenberg@uvm.edu ).
Created/updated: 1995/2001