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The Basics of Building Web Pages and Sites 1

continued

to browser. FTP is used to upload and download ﬁles to and from a workstation to a ﬁle server.

Another way to remember the distinction is that HTTP uses port 80, whereas FTP uses ports 21 and

20 (command and data).

A Web page is written in HTML or

Extensible HTML

(

XHTML

). There are various versions of

HTML, each of which gives greater ﬂexibility to the developer of the Web site to add features such

as interactive forms, embedded scripts, stylesheets, accessibility features and so on. HTML v1.0

provided support for inline images and font manipulation. HTML v2.0 gave interactive elements

to forms (for example, submit, exit, and clear buttons; text boxes or areas; labels; check boxes;

radio buttons; and so on). Most browsers have this level of Web page support. HTML v3.0 features

were never widely used, and the latest version, v4.02, added support for scripting, multimedia, and

stylesheets.

The common features of a simple Web page consist of the following:

■ Head — This section holds information about the Web page. Comment lines within

this section typically provide information on the programmer and program purpose.

These also contain metatags that are used by search engines. These are used to set the

title, load page scripts, and set special tags (such as

META tags) to help other browsers

and systems use the page. Though there may be executable calls to functions contained

in the head, none of the content of the head section appears directly on the Web page.

■ Body — This is where the content is formatted, and it is from the body that the

content is displayed. Typical tags in the body would be

for paragraph (where text

and inline images would appear),

<ul> for a list that is unordered (‘‘ul’’ meaning

‘‘unordered list’’) with a line-by-line column of each item in the list,

<li> for a horizon-

tal line to attractively divide the sections of the Web page, and

<para> for an address.

Chapter 4 provides much more detail about HTML and its basic elements. This discus-

sion provides an introductory examination.

Elements are colloquially referred to as tags,(asintagging an item such as clothes for sale). Note

that all elements (except for two) appear in pairs, indicating an opening tag and a closing tag:

■

■

■ <ul></ul>

■ <li></li>

■

Within each tag pair is the content to be displayed on the Web page.

and <hr /> are both examples are what are called empty tags because they relate to the

appearance or format of the Web page but include no content themselves.