html


	View the html code
	What's special about the World Wide Web is the graphical interface. The pages we see have pretty colors and pictures, but behind every web page there is html code written in plain text. To see the code behind this page, click on View at the top of your browser's screen, and then hit Source or Page Source to see the raw html code in a Notebook window. The green headline at the top of this paragraph is specified by this line: <p><b><font color="#008080" face="Arial">View the html code</font></b> </p> Reading and interpreting html code is the major job of a browser.
	One of the best things about html documents is that anyone with a browser can read them. Ordinary documents created with word processing programs run into compatibility problems -- conflicts between Word and WordPerfect, and between versions of each of them, conflicts between PC and Mac formats, etc. For the Web to function, compatibility is essential.
	Writing html the old-fashioned way
	Text editors. Since html code is plain text, it can be written in a text editor. Many web designers do it that way. They open a text editor like the Windows Notepad, and start by writing <html> at the top of the page. That tells the browser that this is an html page, not an ordinary text document. Writing code that way is very tedious.
	Wysiwyg editors. To create html documents, you do not have to learn html code. You can use one of the many wysiwyg html editors (What You See is What You Get, pronounced wizzywig). But knowing a little bit about html can come in handy for making minor changes.
	Using a word processor to write html
	You can create an html document from a Word document by "saving as" html, but the results are somewhat unpredictable. (Saving an Excel document as html works well.)
	Wysiwyg html editors
	Wysiwyg editors range from very simple to very powerful.
	A powerful editor: FrontPage. This page is being created with Microsoft's very powerful FrontPage 2000 (FP2K). Its power lies not just in the design possibilities, but in its ability to manage complicated websites. The management function requires something called the FrontPage extensions, which must be supported by the web host. Some hosts provide the support, some don't. Some charge extra for it, some don't.
	A simple editor: Netscape's Composer, which comes with the Netscape Communicator browser package. (In the package, Navigator browses, Messenger does e-mail, Composer writes and edits html.) A good reason to become familiar with the Composer is that if you decide to set up your own web page at the Netscape Site Center, you can use the Composer to produce attractive pages.