A collection of annotated links of interest to students, professors and other people at the university who want to use the web to publish information about teaching and research.
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the glue of the world wide web. HTML is a language to specify the structure (rather than the layout) of a text. This means that it specifies which parts of the text are main text, which parts are the headings, what parts are lists, and so on. This information is used by the browser program to present the text in an understandable way. Suggestions for presenting each structure in a particular style (color, font type etc.) should be added by means of another language, CSS (Cascade Style Sheets language). There are many programs that allow you to publish pages on the web without bothering about HTML and CSS. However, in order to understand what one is doing every web author needs to learn the basics of HTML.
HTML comes in several versions. Currently, the official recommendation is using XHTML 1.0. However, XHTML is not yet supported by many browsers. For that reason I would recommend the use of an older version, such as HLML 4.01 or even HTML 3.2.
You will find many HTML and CSS tutorials on the web. Most of them are of doubtful quality. The good ones include:
One of these suffices, my personal favorite is Getting Started with HTML.
There are many programs that pretend to offer WYSIWYG page editing. WYSIWYG is an acronym for "what you see is what you get". Originally this phrase was used to characterize word processors able to present a page on the screen just as it would look on paper after printing. However, in the context of web authoring this phrase is used to claim that what you see when editing a page is what others see when they view the page on the web. If you understand the web you will know that this is impossible. What people see depends on their physical capacities (they may be blind or color blind), the physical capacities and the setting of their monitor, the operating system and the browser they use (this may be a television or a telephone, a braille device or a device that reads out the page aloud), the settings of that browser, the size of the window and so on. This means that you will never know what your readers see (the web is, in other words, WYSINWOG: what you see is not what others get). HTML deals with this problem by dividing responsibilities: it is the responsibility of the authors to specify the structure of their text and the responsibility of the readers and their browsers to present this in an understandable way.
Most would-be-WYSIWYG editors produce very inefficient HTML and result in pages that look excellent to readers with the same visual capabilities like you, who use a similar computer, a similar operating system, the same browser, with similar settings and the same window size; but that are unreadable to many others. There are, however, some very good ones that produce pages that are readable to most readers (and excellent to ones that have the same setup as you). Such browsers (such as Dreamweaver and Go Live) are expensive and have a very steep learning curve. For most users it takes much more time to learn to use a would-be-WYSIWYG editor than to learn HTML.
To sum up this rant, I recommend that you make up your page in HTML (and CSS if you want), using a simple text editor that supports these languages. By HTML support I mean that the editor presents the HTML tags and the text in different colors (this is called syntax coloring) and that it has commands to convert selected text into HTML structures (such as headings, lists and paragraphs). For all operating systems there are good, free HTML editors available.
For example, you could use your favorite word processor to write your text, save it as an unformatted text file, import this into your HTML editor and add HTML tags there (you could even add the HTML mark up in your word processor, but this is very Spartanian).
A very good alternative are text-to-html conversion programs such as Markdown.
This page was made by Arno Wouters.