In HTML, we can format lists of information, such as what you need to know about HTML:
We can also format tables of information. Here's an example that answers the above questions:
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What does HTML stand for? | Hypertext Markup Language |
| What is Hypertext? | Hypertext is text that is annotated with connections (or links) to other pieces of text. Here is a link to the COMP 210 web page. |
| What does HTML look like? | Select View Source from the View menu on Netscape to see the HTML source for this page. |
When you view source, what you'll see is basically the text of the web page, plus a lot of other stuff. This other stuff is all written in brackets <...> and is mostly formatting information. These are called tags, and they come in two basic types:
<a href="http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~comp210/">a link to the COMP 210 web page</a>
creates the link to the COMP 210 home page shown in the table above.
Consider links. A link consists of two pieces of information: the text to highlight and the address (also called a URL, for Universal Resource Locator) of the page to display if someone clicks on the highlighted text. To do: Come up with a structure definition for a link.
What kind of information is each part of the link? We often want to have spaces in the highlighted text, so we can't use a symbol. Instead, we use a sequence of words enclosed in double quotes. We call such a sequence a string.
"This is an example of a string."
We will get more practice with strings and HTML during the next few weeks.