Okay, now that we have all of the political stuff out of the way, lets start
writing some HTML. Actually, lets not start writing HTML, it takes too long
to do anything from scratch when you are first starting out. The way we want
to start is by imitation. Find a home page that you like and copy it, or find
an example of some formatting that you think is appropriate and copy it.
Once you have a copy of the page, load the source and examine it. Edit out
what you don't need, and change the things that you need to. When you come across
a tag that you don't know, look it up and learn its meaning. We will go
over all of the basic tags in this course and cover most of the rest in HTML II.
A comment about intellectual property: the contents of other people's Web pages, including the graphics, are not yours to copy and use without permission. The HTML tags, however, are, because the function of HTML tags is an international public standard. Even though you can quite properly take the HTML tags from someone else's page without permission, it is appropriate to give credit where credit is due, and if you have copied a group of tags, thereby organizing a portion of your page nicely, you should provide acknowledgment and thanks.
Don't do these steps just yet, we will start with a simpler example, and will
go through them in turn.
- Move the mouse to the File menu.
- Choose "Save As"
- The different browsers use slightly different terminology, but you want to make sure that the Format is Source or HTML (not Text); for example, in Windows Internet Explorer, specify a "Save as type" of "Web Page, complete (*.htm;*.html)".
- Specify a meaningful name. On the Macintosh, make sure that there is exactly one period in the name and that what comes after the period is the standard extension, "html" (or "htm"), without the quotes. On Windows, make sure that there is no period in the name, or put quotes around the whole name and include the one period and the standard extension.
- Make sure that there are no space characters in the filename.
Here are links to two template pages. The first is organized as a model of one of the reasonable ways to build a home page. The second is organized as a model for a presentation or "slide show" page. Let's take a look at
their appearance now; we will return to look at the source code at several points throughout this seminar.
- The basic home page.
The basic talk page.
One of the biggest problems with the web is copyright. It is very easy to
copy an image from the web. Every time you load a page, you load a copy of
each image that is in that page. It is easy to save these to disk and use
them in your own pages, and it is very tempting to do so. All I can say is:
be careful. Don't copy images on a page that has the copyright symbol: © on it.
That means the author has a copyright of that image, and you could get in
trouble. If you do not see the ©, though, it doesn't mean the author
doesn't have a copyright for that page. Before you steal an image from a
page that isn't clearly marked as a distribution site, E-mail the author and ask! Most of the time they won't have a problem with it and may have stolen it themselves.
Artists are very protective of their work, and with good reason. When someone spends hundreds of hours learning a software program and creating an image that is "just so," they have a right to be angry if someone uses it and doesn't give them credit. Please be respectful of artists' and authors' rights, and at the very least, give credit on your page where credit is due.
There are many resources on the net for learning more about copyright issues, including:
There are two methods to copy an existing image from a Web page you have found; one works with recent versions of Netscape, and the other works with any browser.
With Netscape
- Place the mouse pointer over the image.
- Pop up the menu: with Windows, right-click; with Macintosh, click and hold the mouse button for a few seconds.
- Select "save this image as ..." from the menu.
- It should default to a reasonable name and file type, but you may need to navigate your way to a different folder.
With any browser
- View the source and examine where the <IMG> tag is pointing to.
- In the location box, type in the URL of the image from the <IMG> tag.
- Note the size in pixels, as shown in the window title, for later reference.
- Choose "Save as" from the File menu, specify "Source" format, and name it appropriately.
Here is a list of places that have interesting textures and buttons and
other images that are freely available for anyone to use in their web
pages.
Back Topics Next
Dick Piccard revised this file (http://www.ohiou.edu/pagemasters/class/html1/thief.html) on January 2, 2002.
Please E-mail any comments or suggestions to acatec@www.ohiou.edu.