Datasheet

15
Chapter 1: Web Publishing Basics
Part III — Chapters 8 through 11 — shows you how to use the CoffeeCup
editor to pull your content together into a Web site. Part IV — Chapters 12
through 15 — shows you how to do the same in “pure” HTML.
Types of Web Sites
The Web offers examples of nearly every communications strategy known to
humanity, successful or not. But not every example of a Web page that you
find online applies to your situation. For one thing, the resources of different
Web publishers vary tremendously — from an individual putting up family
photos to a large corporation creating an online commerce site. For another,
several different types of Web sites exist, and not every lesson learned in
creating one type of Web site applies to the others.
The major types of Web pages are personal, picture, topical, commercial, and
entertainment sites. Increasingly, you can combine different kinds of sites in
mashups — sites that combine different kinds of technologies. (The Web itself
already does that, but a mashup takes combining technologies to another
level.) In the next sections, I describe some of the specific considerations
that apply to each type of Web page and not to the others. Decide in advance
what type of Web page you want to create, and look for other pages like it
online to use as models.
Seeing HTML
When Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML at CERN
(the European particle-physics research facil-
ity) in the late 1980s, he probably never imag-
ined that so many people would be interested in
seeing it. Today, most browsers include a
command that enables you to see the actual
HTML source instructions that make the page
look and work the way it does.
For example, in Internet Explorer, choose
View➪Source to view the underlying HTML file.
You see all the HTML tags that make the Web
page look and act the way it does. However,
some HTML pages are “cleaner” and easier to
read and understand than others. Keep looking
until you find some pages that make sense
to you.
After you open the HTML file, you can edit the
text and the HTML tags, save the file, and then
open the file again in your browser to see how
it looks with the HTML changes. Don’t publish
someone else’s page, of course — but other
than that, experimenting in this way is a good
way to learn.
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