HTML Basics

Homework Links

Because this is lesson one a bit of explanation is in order. Immediately below you should see a link titled Really Basic Stuff that leads to a webpage with a lot of information about HTML. Below the link is a numbered list of topics that you should give special attention to on this webpage. Why? Because I think those particular topics are important for you to learn. Some of those topics (and none others) will also show up on a graded quiz.

Really Basic Stuff

  1. Block elements versus inline elements
  2. Element attributes including
    1. Link (a:) attributes such as href, title and target
    2. Single or double quotes?
  3. Anatomy of a HTML document
    1. Distinction between <html><head> and <body> tags
    2. What about whitespace?
  4. Know about special characters. Don't try to memorize them, just understand what they are and why they are necessary.
  5. HTML comments. What are they? How do you make one?

Metadata. What is it used for? Why?

  1. Character encoding
  2. Author and description
  3. Icons
  4. Also of interest: setting the primary language of a document or simply a span tag.

HTML text fundamentals

  1. Heading elements: <h1><h2<h3> etc.  Structural hierarchy and 'semantics.'
  2. Lists
    1. Unordered versus ordered list
    2. Nesting lists
  3. Emphasis:  <strong>,<em>, <i><b>, and <u> tags.

Hyperlinks

  1. What sort of things can hyperlinks point to?
  2. Link anatomy: purpose of <title> tag within a link
  3. Links and block elements
  4. Links in relation to directories
    1. how to link within same directory
    2. how to link down into subdirectories
    3. how to link up into parent directories
  5. Links to document fragments. Ie. linking to an internal portion of a document.
    1. use of id tags for internal links
    2. absolute versus relative URLS
  6. Best practices for hyperlinks (commit all of these to memory).
    1. Download attribute?
  7. Email links.
    1. Details that can be added to email links

Visual Studio Code

You can use any text editor that you want to in this course, but I recommend Vscode (Visual Studio Code). It's a great editor with a constantly expanding list of features, and it is FREE.