Serving Your Web Page
- Once you have finished writing your web page, it is time to make it available to the rest of the web.
- Serving your web page involves three major steps
- Transferring your HTML document from your personal computer to the web server where it will be served from
- Making sure that people on the web have permission to read the document from the web server
- Letting people know how to find your web page
- Unfortunately, there are about a zillion little specialized features that sysadmins can have on their servers that makes this process confusing and specific to their system, so this discussion must remain fairly generic.
- In order to transfer your HTML document to a web server, you will probably use some form of "FTP" client. You will then connect to your web server using the address, username, and password given to you by your sysadmin.
- Once connected, you will transfer the HTML file from your local directory to your web directory specified by your sysadmin. I recommend transferring in ASCII mode, but with HTML it does not matter as much as it does with CGI scripts
- Once your files have been transferred, you must make sure that the permissions
are set correctly if the web server is running a UNIX OS. To do this, you
should use the chmod command with syntax something like the following:
chmod 644 myhtmlfile.html Notice that you should use the .html (or .htm for some servers) extension for HTML files.
- Once you have set the permissions so that people on the web have access to your files, you are ready to tell people what URL they should type into their browser's location window in order to look at your page. Your sysadmin should help you define the URL.
Exercise Two
- Okay, so now try transferring the HTML page you made in Exercise One to your web server and take a look at it using Netscape.
Modifying Text
- Well as you can see, the basic HTML tags create a pretty darn boring web page. However, HTML includes quite a few other formatting tags to make things look more interesting.
- The most basic of these tags affect how text in the body of your document looks.
- There are three types of text modification tags: those that size text, those that position text, and those that apply text styles.
- It is important to realize however, that style-based tags go against the original intent of HTML by going beyond simple logical-structure descriptions and into presentation.
- Some of the methods we are about to discuss, such as using the <BLOCKQUOTE> tag to align text or using the <B> tag to force text to be bolded, are "officially" bad form. In fact, some browsers which apply HTML standards with rigor may not even pay attention to your code.
- However, most web developers find that pure HTML is simply too limited to do what they need. Thus, by convention, the most popular web browsers have been expanded to allow the web designer more control over style and presentation.
- In the next couple of slides we will discuss some of those style/presentation conventions. But always remember that whenever possible, stick with the logical-definition tags instead of the presentation-definition tags.
Sizing Text
- The following table describes the most common tags used for sizing text:
<H*> </H*>
Creates heading text of varying sizes (from 1-6). To choose a heading level, you replace the * with a number from 1 to 6. For example, a heading level one tag would look like <H1>heading Text level One</H1>. Note that heading tags imbed a line break and can take an optional alignment parameter of LEFT, RIGHT, or CENTER
<FONT SIZE = "*"> </FONT>
You may specify an absolute height such as <FONT SIZE = "4"> or you may specify a size relative to the basefont using the increment notation such as <FONT SIZE = "+2">.
<BIG> </BIG>
Like the <FONT> tag, this tag enlarges the base font size.
- The following HTML code shows how you might size text.
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Sizing Text</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1>H1</H1> <H2>H2</H2> <H3>H3</H3> <H4>H4</H4> <H5>H5</H5> <H6>H6</H6> <FONT SIZE = "1">Font Size = 1</FONT> <BR><FONT SIZE = "7">Font Size = 7</FONT> <BR><FONT> Font size = +0</FONT> <BR><FONT SIZE = "+2">Font Size = +2</FONT> <P> <BIG>big text</BIG> </BODY> </HTML> |
- The following image shows what various font sizes look like...
- Notice in particular that the heading tags (H*) automatically insert a line break after they are done whereas the FONT tags do not.
