Simple HTML and CSS

The simplest page

The simplest web page is a text file which contains only this:

<html> <p>Text of the page. </html>

Create this in a text editor such as Notepad. Or use WordPad or Word, but then save the file as text. Give the file a name like "page.htm" or "page.html".

Then start a browser such as Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, Opera, lynx and open the page that you just saved. You see your first self-made web page.
Here you can read more about this procedure.

As you see HTML consists of text, with commands intermixed, which are between "less than" < and "greater than" > characters. Some commands start somewhere, and also have an end, which is indicated with the same command, but then with a slash in front of it.
Example: </html>.
Some commands may have such an indicated end, but do not need to. Yet others don't have an end at all, <br> for example.

This very simple file does not exactly adhere to the rules. To do a better job a better file structure is recommended. But we'll leave that for now.

First let's look at the text structure.

Paragraphs

This is the text of a paragraph. A paragraph can consist of more than one sentence. In a text processor, a paragraph is terminated with a "hard return". In HTML it makes no difference where hard returns are placed, they will be treated as white space. Multiple spaces and hard returns in a row are treated as if they where a single space. In HTML, a paragraph is indicated by <p>.

A line break can occur even within a paragraph.
This is the start of a new line, even though the paragraph still continues. The HTML code for this is <br>.

Text can be bold, italic or underlined, but it is much better to achieve that using CSS. The same is true for handling fonts, font size, and colour: don't do it, CSS is better, and it has all the features too.

A piece of text can be placed a little higher or lower, the so-called superscript and subscript, which is nice for squaring (x2) and for chemical formulas (H2O is water, H2SO4 is sulphuric acid, and H2S stinks).

A horizontal line, indicated by <hr>, can be used to delimit part of a web page, as is done here above and below.

In separate html files I will dilate upon: