FrontPage - How a Web Page Works

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the programming language that tells your computer how to display the information that is sent to it across the Internet. When you point your browser to an HTML file, the browser reads the code and creates an on-screen display accordingly. If you want to see the code behind a Web page, you can select the "View" option on your browser and click to view the "Source". You will see a page that looks something like:

That is the code you will see if you view the source for this tutorial's table of contents page. It is what tells your browser to make your screen look like it does when you point it to the HTML file at http://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/tut/frontpage/.

Back in the old days of creating Web pages, entering code like that was the way it was done. But Web editors such as FrontPage do all the code work for you in the background. Type in and edit text like a word processor, and click various toolbar icons or menu items for inserting and modifying images and other elements, and you are done. You can still edit and tweak the code if you want to, but unless you are doing some very specialized stuff, you will not need to be concerned with HTML code at all.

But knowing that the code is there offers you a nice trick to figure out how someone else created an impressive Web page. View the source of the page you found so impressive, then copy the source into a page in FrontPage, and you can see how it was done. (See the page on Getting Started for how to paste HTML code into your page) Then you can easily figure out how to create your own similar effects. Don't forget about copyright rules, however; they apply to online publications, so don't pass someone else's work off as your own. 

 

Next: Getting Started

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Contents - How a Web Page Works - Getting Started - Page Settings - Text Options
Creating Links - Images - Tables - Preview - Design Tips - Managing Your Web Site