Review of Week 1 of IST 129

Review of first week:

The first week described the structure of a web page, how to create, view, and revise a web page, and most of the elements of text formatting covered in chapter 1 of the text. Some additional text formatting topics will be covered in week 3 of the course (e.g. alignment attributes, font tag).

Tags that should appear in every page (one of each, in this order): <html><head</head><body></body></html>
Tags are not case sensitive - can be upper case, lower case, or mixed case
Tag syntax: <tag attribute1=value1 attribute2=value2>Some content</tag> Some tags don't have attributes; the closing tag looks the same as the opening tag except it begins with a /. The closing tag does not include any attribute=value pairs
Most tags have a closing tag because one needs to specify when the formatting effect of the tag ends.
Heading tags (<h1> through <h6>) render the text bold, on its own line; among the heading tags, h1 produces the largest text, with h6 the smallest
When a browser displays an html file, it ignores any carriage returns in the document, so if one wants to force the browser to the next line, one uses a tag (stands for break) or a tag (stands for paragraph). A results in a blank line. The tag has a optional closing tag, whereas the is a one-sided tag, i.e. no closing tag.
When a browser displays an html file, it ignores any extra spaces in the document, so if wants to force the browser to display a space, one types   (stands for non-breaking space).
Bulleted lists:<ul><li>list item with optional closing tag </li> followed by more <li> for additional items or use <ol> instead of <ul> for numbered lists. The type attribute can be used to control what type of bullet point is displayed or what numbering is used.
<title>Bill</title> tag in head section of the document will result in the title Bill being displayed in title bar of browser, the title being the default bookmark or favorite for the page, and what a search engine will display as a link
Logical tags such as , , <cite> vs. physical tags such as , ,
Comments in the html file use the following syntax:  The comment can be a single-line or multiple line comment
Web pages ordinarily are saved with either an .htm or .html extension. They then can be displayed in the browser by opening the browser, selecting File>Open and then browsing to the html file. Alternatively, one can double-click the html file in Windows Explorer or My Computer, and the associated application (normally the default browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape) will be launced and the file double-clicked will be displayed by the browser.
If you make changes in the html file, 2 steps are necessary before you will see the change in the browser -- save the file and refresh/reload the page in the browser
Once a page is displayed in the browser, one can see the source code displayed in Notepad by selecting View>Source in Internet Explorer or a similar command in Netscape 6 or 7. In Netscape 4, viewing the source code doesn't permit one to change the source code.
Tags should be properly nested; for example Hello rather than Hello.
To determine where your personal student webspace is located at NVCC, you must determined your LANID -- see the link from the first week of the schedule page. Your personal URL will then be www.student.nvcc.edu/home/lanid
The instructor will send email, unless instructed otherwise, to your VCCS email account. Instructions on accessing the VCCS email account can be found through the link on the IST 129 schedule page.

Revised: January 21, 2004. Comments to William Pegram, wpegram@nvcc.edu