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Authoring Webpages

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Web development icon
Authoring Webpages

Foreword

The World Wide Web (often simply called "the Web") is a means of communication using inter-linked pages of text called "web pages". A coherent group of such pages is called a "website". This short course will attempt to provide a hands-on approach to teach you how to make high-quality web pages. After a short introduction, you will be thrown in at the deep end and start making web pages yourself.

Table of contents


 

A printable version of Authoring Webpages is available. (edit it)

  1. Requirements
  2. Introduction: the World Wide Web
  3. Creating a simple page
  4. How to write for the web
  5. Adapting a webpage for visual browsers
  6. HTML, XHTML and DOCTYPEs
  7. Collecting pages in a website
  8. Promote your website
  9. Scalable websites (Advanced topic)
  10. Avoiding pitfalls
  11. Preventing link rot
  12. Conclusion
  13. Answers

Rationale

Many textbooks approach the creation of webpages and websites as a computing task. Many others approach it as a graphical design challenge. Both approaches are rooted in treating the web as if it were a computational or graphical medium. Rooting the web in a understandable metaphor may be comforting, it is also misleading.

The web is a new medium, that requires a completely new approach to building parts of it. Although students will often pick up some of the right concepts while studying the 'programming' and 'designing' books, it is often better to start with the right concepts, and deal with the computational and graphical aspects of the web later.

What this textbook therefore tries to accomplish, is providing the student with a strong basis for learning more about building webpages. This book will try and do this in a practical, hands-on way. Almost from the get-go, students will start authoring their own webpages.

For teachers

For further reading

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