Task: Open Notepad and work through the tutorial at http://www.pagetutor.com/html_tutor/index.html. Once your have completed the lessons, save it as ‘index.html’ and upload to your space in the presentations page of webct.
Log entry: This exercise was a good refresher for me, as I hadn’t used html for a while. And now I remember why I haven’t … I wasted a lot of time getting an image to work – in the end because I’d spelt the file name wrong. But overall it was fun to play around with, and it felt good to complete the exercise.
My preference is still to use a html editor, especially because you can browse and find the files you need on your computer, and there’s less risk of making silly errors. On the other hand, doing this exercise reminds you of the need for good practice in things like file naming, keeping a logical directory structure and using a ‘clean’ nested tag structure. It’s also good to be aware of the basic tags, and to be able to use them directly if you want to have a bit more control over the appearance of a web page.
The advantage of the easy-to-use interface I use for my blog (and other web page design tools) is that you can use html if you want, and can use html or directly edit the CSS if you prefer.
I also used validator.w3.org to validate my web page, using the direct input method. It failed at first because I hadn’t specified the ’doctype’. It also picked up a couple of errors because I hadn’t applied ’strict’ html 4.01. Overall, however, I found this to be a handy tool, and I’ll probably use it again if I’m having trouble getting my web pages to work.
