HTML for the Novice
Problem Statement
HTML file skeleton:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
...
</HEAD>
<BODY>
...
</BODY>
</HTML>
Writing an HTML file consists in filling up the spaces occupied by the ellipses.
How to use this Tutorial
First, scrutinize this page all the way down carefully. Then, go to the HTML source file of this page and study the one-to-one correspondence between the page and the source. Start creating your own page, making sure that you can shuttle between this page and your page. After that, just follow common sense.
It is necessary to know some facts, before we can comfortably use the HyperText Markup Language. We will list only a few essential ones.
Here are some color codes:
FF0000 = Red:
008844 = BottleGreen:
FFFF66 = Yellow:
AA9999 = Grey:
0000FF = Blue:
00FF00 = Green:
000000 = Black:
CC33FF = Purple:
00CCFF = LightBlue:
FFFFFF = White:
DDDDCC = OffWhite: the background color of this page
DDFFDD = LightOlive:
FFAAAA = PinkBrown:
00AA88 = NiceGreen:
CCCC99 = olive1:
CCCC88 = olive2:
CCCC77 = olive3:
CCCC66 = olive4:
CCCC55 = olive5:
CCCC44 = olive6:
CCCC33 = olive7:
CCCC22 = olive8:
You can draw thick lines like the one below:
You can list items as below:
- tat twam asi
- prajnanam brahma
- aham brahmasmi
- ayam atma brahma
You can enumerate items as below:
- That Thou Art
- Perception is The Absolute
- I am The Absolute
- This Self is The Absolute
You can have definitions like the ones below:
- karma
- The accumulated mental inheritance of an individual from all his ancestors of the remote past, is called karma. For this reason, karma has been often loosely translated as fate. It is claimed that karma dominates the happennings in the entire life of a person. While what one has inherited is not under one's control, The Doctrine of Karma, fortunately, provides a way to get rid of the troublesome karma. The stricture is to be of constant service to one's fellow creatures, without anticipation of any reward. Since, all living creatures are manifestations of The Absolute, this service is also called sacrifice, in the original sense of the word: make sacred. If one is not willing to make sacrifices, the only other way to get rid of karma is to go through samsara.
- samsara
- The unavoidable cycle of misery that one goes through in life is called samsara. Karma sets up the ambience required for this misery. The redeeming feature of this suffering is that it is also considered to be a method to get rid of one's karma. It is generally believed that suffering purifies a person.
- moksha
- In Vedanta Philosophy, a person is considered equal to or part of The Absolute, if there is no karma left in the person. When a person reaches this state, the person is said to be in a superconscious state, also called samadhi. When the samadhi is permanent, the person is said to have attained moksha, loosely translated as liberation. The large majority attains moksha by going through the incessant cycle of miseries, but a rare few attain moksha through sacrifices.
You can have different font sizes as below:
Level one header
Level two header
Level three header
Level four header
Level five header
Level six header
You can center text like this
You can have
Bold text,
Italic text,
and
Bold and italic text.
Inserting a tag <BR>
will cause the current line to end and a new one to start.
Inserting a tag <P>
will cause the current line to end, a blank line to be inserted, and a new line to start.
There are times when it is nice to have your text appear just the way you have typed it. You can do this by
placing a tag <PRE> before the typed text
Invisible is The Absolute, visible is The Absolute
Universe emanates from The Absolute
Creating even the transfinite
The Absolute ever remains the same
---Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad 5.1.1
and a tag </PRE>
at the end. Your text will appear in typewriter font.
Sometimes you may like to jump to another part of the page to take a quick look at something. You can do this through hyper reference. For example, click: publishing mathematics on the Web, to go down this page.
You can insert nice pictures like the ones below:
aligned to the right,
aligned to the center,
and aligned to the left.
You can insert a small picture to hyper reference a large one:
You can insert a text string to hyper reference a picture:
Sparkling Sea of Kerala, INDIA
You can insert a text string to hyper reference a page on the Web:
My academic interests
Where do we go from here
This tutorial contains only the essentials required to make a beginning. After you have used this page a few times to create your own pages, you will begin to notice the limited number of tags we are utilizing. When this happens, download the full list of HTML tags from the Web, and shuttle between the full list, this page, and your page.
Even though HTML forms the backbone of the Web, it is not the only markup language used on the Internet. There is another very sophisticated markup language called TeX, used widely by mathematicians. If you want to know more about publishing mathematics on the Web, click here.
END of this page
