Maddog's HTML Primer for Real People

Chapter 2, Lesson 3

Ch 2, L 3 - Simple Text on our Web Page

If you already know how to create and edit text in the body of an HTML document, you can skip this lesson.

The classic first computer program is the dreaded "Hello World". Everybody who learns to program, does "Hello World" as their first classroom exercise. [I think it's a cult thing...]. Anyway, even though HTML is not strictly "programming" per se, we'll do the exercise, mainly because I'm a slave to ritual.

The neat thing about HTML is that the receiving browser does all the work of pretty-ing things up. So even though the text we enter is stupid ol' non-descript text, when the browser gets ahold of it, it will decide what nice font to put on the screen, and it will make sure it's nicely word-wrapped, even if we didn't pay attention to line-length in our original HTML source document.

Up til now, we've managed to build a web page with a title but nothing in the body. Now we do something real, placing our simple text message "Hello Web World!" somewhere after the <BODY> tag, and before the closing </BODY> tag. Let's look:


  <HTML>
  <HEAD>
  <TITLE> Our HELLO WORLD Web Pge   </TITLE>
  </HEAD>
  <BODY>
  Hello Web World!
  </BODY>
  </HTML>

Hello Web World!

We could as easily [well... not the way I type] have entered the text of our favorite Shakespearean prose, and the receiving browser would have "neatened it up" [we Texans talk this way... sorry], and made it very nicely readable, thank you.

Overseer: Monty Northrup ...

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