HTML as a vehicle for the creation of content oriented web pages is a model for openness. Here's some of the ways in which there is openness regarding HTML.

• The basics are easy to learn. You should be able to learn the basics in less than an hour given proper help.
• The tools you need to build a web page are just a text editor, a browser, and an OS to run them on. If you are looking at this page you likely already have access to all three.
• There are a constantly growing number of pages on the Web that you can look at as examples. Through your browser you likely can look at the HTML source that generates them. In many cases you can then figure out how to create similar pages.
• You can get your pages hosted for close to no cost if you shop around a little.

There are some who claim that HTML is an arcane language that only experts should deal with. But if your aim is to create basic content oriented pages, this claim has no merit.

What if you care about presentation? Cascading style sheets (CSS) addresses this quite nicely. As long as you keep things simple, using them is not hard. One way is to put the style sheet in a separate file and add one line to the HTML that references the style sheet.

Of course you can get as ambitious as you wish with HTML and then you may want the aid of an expert. But beware of people that tell you basic HTML is inherently difficult. It's not.

Copyright 2001 George Woolley

return to MAC to Linux