BUILD YOUR OWN WEB SITE THE RIGHT WAY USING HTML & CSS

HTML5 is the latest and most enhanced version of HTML. Technically, HTML is not a programming language, but rather a markup language. This tutorial gives very good understanding on HTML5.

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All rights reserved. No part of this Tutorial may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

NOTICE OF LIABILITY

The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information here in. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors or its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages to be caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein.

PREFACE

Let’s take a step back for a moment, and look at another skill that many people learn at some point in their lives: learning to drive. Apologies if that particular experience is also new to you, but stick with me. For many people, their first driving lessons can be very confusing; they have to figure out which pedals to press, in what order, and manage to drive off without hitting anything. Meanwhile, other more experienced people just jump into their cars, start the engine, and drive from A to B without really thinking about what they’re doing. These drivers may have picked up a few bad habits along the way, but if they learned with a proper driving instructor, the chances are they were taught properly from the beginning—following a strict set of rules to ensure they stayed safe.

The driving instructor tells you to check your mirrors diligently, observe speed limits, and avoid cutting corners (literally as well as metaphorically!). Imagine, though, if the instructor told you not to worry about the speed limit signs, to put your foot down because the road is clear, or told you that the one-way sign “wasn’t all that important at that time of night.” It’d be a miracle if you passed your driving test, and the chances are that those bad habits would stay with you (so long as you could manage to keep your license).

Learning to build web pages can be a bit like that. I’ve been designing and building web sites for around some years now, but I can clearly remember the joy of creating my first site. Admittedly, in hindsight, it was a pretty nasty-looking web site, but it achieved the goal at the time—I had published a web site, and I was able to create it with the bare minimum of tools. It gave me an enormous sense of achievement, and made me want to learn more and create even better web sites.

At the time, there was a limited amount of books available that seemed to provide what I wanted, but I lapped up everything I could find, learning some tricks from books, and gaining other ideas from visiting web sites. But then I discovered that I’d been doing it all wrong. The books I had learned from had given me what later turned out to be poor advice; the web sites I’d visited had been built by people learning from the same sources and hence, making use of similar, bad techniques. So, what had gone wrong?

In the early days of the web, when people first started properly to embrace the technology, to publish homepages, and to develop online corporate presences for their companies, they all realized fairly quickly that the medium was limited. Necessity is the mother of invention, though. So, web developers began to coax tricks and displays out of their web pages that were never intended by the technologies they used; the browsers helped them along the way by adding features that offered even more opportunities for this kind of behavior.

Numerous books have been written on the topics of web design and programming, as have many free tutorials that you can read on the web. Many of them were written during those heady years, and were based on what seemed like best practices back then; however, their authors were constrained by browsers that often rendered the same well-designed pages in vastly different ways. This meant that the tutorials’ authors needed to resort to abusing various features of those browsers, such as using data tables to lay out pages. This certainly encouraged many people to build their first web pages, but it ensured that bad habits were ingrained at an early stage, and many people are still using these bad practices years later.

Web developers the world over have learned bad habits (myself included) and must now try to unlearn them all. There’s no longer a need for these practices—they often produce pages that are inflexible, slow to download, and difficult to maintain—but like the badly taught driver who insists on flouting the rules because it’s worked for him so far, many developers find these outdated habits difficult to break. I saw the light many years ago, and have tried to educate as many people as possible since. But for the eager beginner, those same old books are still peddling the same bad old ideas. This just has to stop. And it stops here and now.

You’re not going to learn any bad habits in this book or Tutorial. Not one.

In this book or Tutorial, you’ll learn the right way to build a web site. If there’s a wrong way to do things—a way that cuts corners to save time but encourages bad techniques—we won’t even tell you about it. Not even as a “by the way, you might try this…” You won’t need to avert your eyes—we’ll take care of that for you!

Who Should Read This Book?

· an absolute beginner—at least as far as creating web pages’ go

· confident with using a computer, but not necessarily a power user someone who uses the Web a lot, enjoys other people’s web sites, and would like to create your own for one of your hobbies, or for a community you belong to

· quickly put off by the techno-babble that computer people tend to speak when you try to discuss a technical problem

· perhaps a little daunted about learning this new skill, but still keen to learn (with some friendly hand-holding)

What You’ll Learn from This Book

By the time you finish reading this book and trying out the exercises contained within, you’ll be able to build a complete web site—the right way—without incurring any costs for expensive software or web hosting. Using an example web site, I’ll guide you through the process of developing web pages from scratch. From these humble beginnings, great things will evolve! By the end of the book, you’ll be able to create a web site that includes the following features:

· easy-to-use navigation

· a professional-looking site header

· attractive web page forms and so on

This book will take you through each new topic using a step-by-step approach. It provides a mixture of examples and practical exercises that will soon have you feeling confident enough to try a little HTML for yourself. This tutorial is designed for the aspiring Web Designers and Developers with a need to understand the HTML in enough detail along with its simple overview, and practical examples. This tutorial will give you enough ingredients to start with HTML from where you can take yourself at higher level of expertise.