		Mastering Intranet and Internet Technology

An Information Provider's Guide to HTML

Introduction

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author - Nathan Torkington.

This document is an introduction to the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). It is intended to be a gentle primer for information providers who want to know the background, purpose and functionality of the language. It is not intended to be a first introduction to the Web, nor a definitive guide to the markup language.

This document is available on the Web, as well as being posted fortnightly to the Usenet newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.providers. It is available via anonymous ftp. For instructions on retrieving the latest version of this document, consult the last section, called ``How to obtain this document''.

This document was last revised on Mon Dec 12 17:53:49 NZD 1994 by Nathan Torkington.

Introduction
Table of Contents
HTML and SGML
The Appearance of HTML
The Future of HTML
Conversion to HTML
Conversion from HTML
Editing HTML
What to Avoid
See Also
How to obtain this document

HTML and SGML

HTML is a way of marking up documents that conforms to the ISO standard 8879: ``The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)''. HTML provides a way of encoding document structure with a minimum of presentation information. SGML is a standard way of describing what the markup looks like.

The description of the markup is called a ``Document Type Definition'', or DTD. The DTD for HTML is available on the Web as http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/HTML.dtd.html.

The Appearance of HTML

HTML looks like plain text with tags attached. The tags are enclosed in angle brackets (<...>) and the names of the tags reflect the structure of the document. For instance, there are tags to enclose headings (<H1>This is a heading at level 1</H1>), the title of a document (<TITLE>The Title</TITLE>), lists (<OL> for an Ordered List), and so on.

Despite the efforts to encode only meaning in HTML, authors have requested some tags that define presentation. For instance, <B>text</B> places the word ``text'' in a bold font, if this is meaningful to the program interpreting the HTML (it might be a useful tag for a browser, but not for an automatic indexer).

The Future of HTML

The HTML language is officially under the control of an IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) Working Group. The version of HTML in use as of December 1994 has been locked as HTML2.0 and an RFC will be forthcoming.

Future of developments with HTML will take place with HTML3.0, a DTD for which is available as [url?]. HTML3.0 extensions include tables and style sheets. A highly experimental HTML3.0 browser for X called Arena is available for FTP from ftp.w3.org, which implements HTML3.0.

Netscape Communications, authors of the browser Netscape, have released their own extensions to HTML which do not come from HTML3.0. They are under considerable pressure to conform to HTML3.0.

The goal is that any future developments with HTML, and any future language(s), will not replace HTML in the sense that HTML will no longer be supported. They will exist side-by-side with HTML, and be as backward compatible as possible.

Conversion to HTML

Rich Brandwein has a comprehensive list of conversion programs, available on the Web as http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Tools/Filters.html.

Conversion from HTML

HTML can be turned into formatted ASCII by the CERN LineMode Browser (see the entry on ``LineMode Browser'' in the section ``See Also'' for information on obtaining the source for this program). The emacs browser also has this ability (see the entries on ``EMACS'' and ``w3.el'' in the section ``See Also'' for information on obtaining the source for this program).

HTML can be turned into LaTeX with either the CERN html2latex.sed script (see the entry on ``html2latex.sed'' in the section ``See Also'' for information on obtaining this script) or Nathan Torkington's html2latex C program (based on the XMosaic v0.11 parser). See the entry on ``html2latex'' for information on obtaining the source for this program.

Editing HTML

There are currently no WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors for HTML besides the one in TkWWW (see the entry on ``TkWWW'' in the section ``See Also'' for information on obtaining TkWWW).

There is EMACS mode for editing HTML, written by Marc Andreeson (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu). See the entry on ``html-mode.el'' in the section ``See Also'' for information on obtaining it.

jeff.grover@gtri.gatech.edu (Jeffrey L. Grover) has written a set of WordPerfect for Windows macros, but they are still in alpha-test and aren't for release yet.

If you have access to an RTF, WordPerfect or similar editor, which can be converted to HTML, you can edit with your favourite text editor and add in any hypertext links after the conversion to HTML.

I, personally, write with a text editor and add the tags by hand.

What to Avoid

Avoid taking advantage of the way that one browser interprets tags, because other browsers may not display the document in the same way. Attempt to check the way your document appears on many different browsers. Use style-sheets when they become available.

Avoid writing HTML that doesn't conform to the standard. You can verify your HTML document by running the sgmls program over the HTML DTD and your document (see the entry on ``sgmls'' in the section ``See Also'' for information on obtaining sgmls).

How to obtain this document

The latest version of this document is always available on the Web as http://www.vuw.ac.nz/non-local/gnat/www-html.html, and the most recently posted ASCII version will be available via anonymous FTP from rtfm.mit.edu in the directory /pub/usenet/news.answers/www as html-guide. The ASCII, LaTeX, DVI, and PostScript versions will be available via anonymous FTP from wuarchive.wustl.edu in the directory /doc/misc/www/.

This document is part of a series: ``World Wide Web Primer'', ``An Information Provider's Guide to HTML'', and ``An Information Provider's Guide to Web Servers''. The other documents in the series are available from the archives above.

Please send feedback to the author, Nathan Torkington, at the e-mail address Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz --- all discussion will be treated as public domain and may be used in future versions of this document.

	Web Author: Geoff May	Last Update: 03/04/2000
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