Setup
The first thing you need to do is make sure you have a text editor installed, and that your operating system allows you to see file extensions. If you're running Windows 95/98/ME or Windows NT4/2000, you have a text editor installed (Notepad), and you can make Windows show you your file extensions by following these steps:
- Double-click on My Computer on your Desktop.
- Click the "View" menu or the "Tools" menu and look for "Folder Options".
- In the "Folder Options" window, click on the "View" tab at the top.
- Somewhere towards the middle of the window, there should be a bunch of check boxes and round buttons (called "radio buttons"). Look for one that says something like "Hide file extensions for known file types" and uncheck it.
The purpose of unhiding your file extensions is this: webpages are really just text documents, saved with a different file extension. Normally, when you open Notepad and write something in it and then save the file, it will save it as "whatever.txt", where whatever is the name you gave the file, and .txt is the file extension. You create webpages in Notepad the same way, except you save them as "whatever.htm", where .htm (or sometimes .html) is the file extension meaning that the file is a webpage. That is the because webpages are written in a programming language called html, or hyper text markup language. Anyway, you will often have to view the source of a webpage (which just means viewing the html code it was written in), and if you have your files extensions hidden, sometimes Notepad will try to open a webpage you wrote, instead of letting your web browser do it. To fix this, you need to be able to see the file extensions, because you will need to rename a file from myfile.txt to myfile.htm so that your web browser will open it.
Which brings us to the second setup issue: web browsers. If you use Windows, then you should use Internet Explorer (IE) as your web browser. (All versions of Windows have it installed, except some early versions of Windows 95, and you can always download the latest version for free at www.microsoft.com/ie.) Some people prefer Netscape, but I don't, for several reasons. First of all, as I said, if you have Windows, then you already have IE installed. Second, IE is tightly integrated into Windows, and it opens much more quickly than Netscape does. Third, the latest full release of Netscape at this time (October 19th, 2000) doesn't correctly support Style Sheets, which are one of the nicest features of web programming, and one of the easiest to use as well. Fourth, html tables look sick in Netscape, but they look like they're supposed to look in IE. Fifth, the blue E in the next paragraph doesn't display in Netscape. (It won't display bitmaps for some ridiculous reason.) I could go on and on... the bottom line is, IE is already installed, it's quicker, it's better, and it works correctly... so it's what I use, and I think you should use it too.
To see if you have it installed, look for the blue "e": 
This may be on your desktop, on the taskbar at the bottom of your screen, or on the Start Menu under Programs. If you can't find it that way, click Start, then "Find" or "Search" and type iexplore.exe in the "look for files named" box. Make sure "look in" is set to your local hard drive (probably the c: drive). When you find it, click on it and drag it to your desktop to make a shortcut. If you didn't find it, just go to www.microsoft.com/ie and download the latest version of IE for free. (As of October 19th, 2000, the latest version is 5.5)
Now, I am going to be teaching you how to get started with HTML and some of the basics of the language. Then I will tell you where to find more advanced HTML information. For the most part, Netscape and IE display basic HTML the exact same way, but there are some things that they do differently. For this reason, it is a good idea to download and install a copy of Netscape too, so that you can see how your webpages show up in that browser. If you want to use IE as your main browser, though, make sure you don't associate your .htm files with Netscape when you install it. If you do, just start IE and tell it to be your default browser.
One last thing before we get started... another tool that I sometimes use in the development of webpages is Microsoft Frontpage, which is included with Microsoft Office 2000, and you may already have it on your computer... just look around the Start Menu for it. It lets you type webpages just like you'd type a Microsoft Word document, and you can learn the HTML code for some things by using Frontpage. It's usually better to just use Notepad, because you have more control over your code, but sometimes Frontpage helps out too. You can buy Frontpage (apart from MS Office) for around $85 -- check www.pricewatch.com and www.pricescan.com. I just wanted to let you know that this option is available; it's not necessary at all, and it's not better either.
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