comm207fall06

A couple of links here to help you get under way before Tuesday's class, chosen almost at random out of the many that popped up when I did a Google search engine keyword search.

The best, I think, is called "Getting Started with HTML" on the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) website. W3C works with international standards on the Internet, and to my layperson's eye looks like it has pretty high-powered and current information available. The turorial is by Dave Raggett of W3C, who lists a D.Phil. from Oxford and an extensive range of work with HTML on his curriculum vitae. More to the point, it's very clear and beginner-friendly without being cutsey about it. It's the one I plan to keep going back to, but I'll list a couple of others below as well.

"So, you want to make a Web Page!" A beginner-friendly tutorial by Joe Barta at PageTutor.com . PageTutor sells memberships, as well as books and companion CDs. But Barta's tutorial gives away enough samples of the product to get you started -- and, he surely hopes, to appreciate his approach enough to buy more product. I sampled the first three lessons, and I didn't get lost. Which is saying something.

Webmonkey is a large website with a variety of information about web design. Its "Authoring" directory has links to an introduction on HTML tags, a "teaching tool" that lets you practice using the tags and an "HTML Cheat Sheet" that I keep in my favorites file at home.

Several years old but still very basic, clear and informative is an Introduction to HTML by Eric E. Meyer of Case Western Reserve University. It's copyrighted 1995-1996, and in an appendix on then-recent developments dated June 30, 1996, Meyer predicted " this whole Appendix will be out of date within the next nine to eighteen months." He was probably right on that, but the basics of HTML are the same.