Lesson 3
Okay, we're ready to dive in now. Let's take a look at two of the most important tags you will use.
<BODY></BODY>
The body tag defines the main body of your page. The body tag has several properties you can use. Keep in mind that these are all optional, and are only needed if you want to use something other than the default value.
BGCOLOR=color
The BGCOLOR property sets the background color for your web page. You can use basic color names, such as white or red. Browser's only know so many colors by name. If you get more complicated, the browser may try to guess what color you mean, and guess wrong. The best way to do it is to use the color's HEX value. HEX values are a standard way to specify colors, and browser's can handle any HEX value. For example, the HEX value for white is "#000000". Another thing to keep in mind is that different browsers display colors differently. For a list of colors that are HTML safe (meaning they will display properly in any broswer) see the HTML Color Chart.
BACKGROUND="somepic.jpg"
The background tag is used to specify a picture to use as the page background. If you choose an image smaller than the page, it will be tiled repeatedly to fill up the page. You are pretty much limited to using a .gif or a .jpg file. You can use a bitmap, .bmp, but they are really big, so your visitors will hate you.
TEXT=color
Sets the text color for the current document.
LINK=color
This sets the color for linked text. The default is usally bright blue.
VLINK=color
This sets the color for visited links (links that you have clicked on and then come back).
That's all for the body tag, let's move on to the font tag. Keep in mind, everything between the tags will be affected.
<FONT></FONT>
The font tag is used to control the presentation of the text on your page. Here are the options.
COLOR=color
The color you want the font to be. This overrides the default font color for the page, but does not affect links.
FACE="font name"
This let's you set the font you want to use. The drawback is that the person must have that font on their computer in order to see it, so pick a common font. You can specify more than one font in decending order by saying FACE="Arial","Serif",... and it will go down the list until it finds one that works.
SIZE=size
This set's the size of the font. Unlike you are used to, HTML does not use point sizes. The valid sizes are 1-7. The default value corresponds to 12 point type, I think. You can also specify a relative font size by saying SIZE=+# (increases current font size by the #) or SIZE=-# (decreases current font size by the #).
These are probably the two tags you'll use the most. Now let's take a look at formatting text on the page.
[Introduction]
[Lesson 1]
[Lesson 2]
[Lesson 3]
[Lesson 4]
[Lesson 5]
[Lesson 6]
[More Resources]
