Tree of Life Garden

Designing with HTML

Arachne's Web presents a tutorial designed to help the (as yet) technologically challenged overcome HTML stage fright and begin to enjoy coding at home.

You can download a copy of the blank html file here.

A Lesson from Psyche

CSS, the Aphrodite of web coding, says HTML is ugly. But by lighting our lamp to peer at its face, we’ll see that even HTML can create lovely webpages.

With these lessons, we attempt to lift the darkness surrounding HTML and give you the tools you need to beautify your Ancientworlds homepage, even without the use of CSS.

Arachne’s Web Academy invites you to join us as we explore the basics of HTML. Here, we hope you will begin to see through the darkness of your homepage source code and recognize the structure within.

Why are we doing this?

Many of our citizens have said that HTML might as well be ancient Greek (although our Greek citizens say it could be Navajo). Tags, attributes, and values become blurred, and reading the source code affords no clarity…especially when they run across Javascript and CSS codes. Clearly, someone needs to explain this web language…in non-technical terms.

By learning HTML, our citizens will better understand the challenges the Ancientworlds environment presents. It will give them a good basis for comprehending later how CSS can assist them in making the changes and improvements they long to see in their pavilion, taigh, domus, bitum, haim, wasi, or oikos. Bringing this light to the darkness is our aim in these tutorials. The class is gathered, it’s time to bring on the HTML!

Signing up for Lessons

Anyone and everyone is welcome to sit in on our classes. Member of Arachne’s Web or not, citizen of Ancientworlds or not, everyone is welcome. There’s no sign up, no log in. The pages are freely viewable. Just bring your computer, your web browser, and yourself

Try the exercises or just read through them. The choice is yours. There’s no homework involved, but we suggest you give the concepts a whirl. Read thru the lessons and then try to see the structures discussed in your homepage source code. Lesson 04-HTML Syntax, Part Three will tell you how.

Hopefully, by the time the lessons are over, you’ll have a good grip on how to create your own pages from scratch. In the meantime, if you would like to follow along, applying the lessons to this document as we go, you can download a copy of this html file above and you won’t have to type it. Just save it to your hard drive and bring it up in the text editor of your choice.

What’s in it for me?

As we mentioned in Lesson 01-What is HTML? HTML is the lingua franca of the web. Ancientworlds is coded using it in combination with Javascript and CSS. But the basic building block is HTML. What you get out of these lessons is a stronger understanding of the most widely used markup language on the web today.

What do I need to participate?

The beauty of HTML is you don’t need to spend lots of money buying fancy programs to build your webpages for you. All you need is a simple text editor...like Notepad. You don’t have to learn esoteric commands or think in convoluted programming languages. Once you get the hang of it, HTML is nearly self-explanatory.

Yes, it does have a lot of “tags” to learn, but you don’t need to have these memorized. You just need to know very basic features to create most of what you want…remember, at Ancientworlds, your homepage already exists. All you need to know is how to manipulate the portions you’re interested in. Eventually, you’ll be ready to try your hand at some CSS, and with an knowledge of HTML to support you, the “syntax” of CSS will be easy!

For this tutorial webpage, we’ll be giving you links to the graphics you need, but you can always create your own in their place. For ease of substitution, you might want to make them the same size. And, please, if you do substitute, respect copyright and use your own original images.

Above all, know that although this is a learning exercise, it’s meant to be fun. I’ll try to explain the concepts in plain English, but I may only think I’m succeeding. If you don’t “get” something, let me know. Leave messages on the Tutorial Discussions - HTML/XHTML thread and I’ll try my best to clarify my explanation.

Many thanks to Ancientworlds and Arachne’s Web for hosting these lessons.