A top level heading

These headings are displayed with the help of the style sheet, "ExploreCSS.css"

A simple paragraph.

A more realistic paragraph with bold / strong and italic / emphasised text in it. The following break
is not as pronounced as a <p> or paragraph. That last bit was marked using the characters needed to display < and > which are forbidden within your body text (for obvious reasons).

  1. This is an ordered list.
  2. Items in it automatically get numbered.
  3. That means no need to renumber if you add a point.

You can edit the page to your heart's content in any simple editor, like Windows Notepad. With a complex page the problem is making sure that all the opening and closing brackets are right. If not you might get unpredictable results in a browser. That's where a simple checker can be very useful. A simple free checker is available. This last bit of markup shows you how to create a link to another web page.

Some additional points that may be of interest:

  1. That bit starting "<!DOCTYPE html" at the top defines this as an XHTML document. In essence this is one of a series of dialects for writing web pages. This particular dialect requires that you close all tags. So every bracket has a closing bracket associated with it. A few tags like <br /> have the closing symbol built in, they are one piece tags.
  2. The bit starting "<link href=" says that the way the text looks is defined by an external file. This makes changing the whole way the page looks very easy.
  3. Another set of tags that is useful at times are the table tags (<table>, <tr>, <td>) which describe rectangular tables of data. These are not described here. The tags define the overall table, a row in it and a cell within a row.
  4. The "<div" tag wrapped around the text on the page allows the width of the text and other things to be easily changed.
  5. Tags are more potent than simple brackets. They can contain parameters like in the link (anchor / a) tag, above.
  6. The image tag "<img" is used to put in pictures.

After a couple of hours playing with these basics you know the fundamentals and can appreciate how not to create bad markup. Bad markup will unintentionally amuse some of your visitors. (A quick check around the Internet will reveal a surprising number of pages with poor markup. They may get away with it, because browsers are forgiving, but they are becoming less forgiving and there's a risk that a poor page will fail some day.)

This page is intended to be read while you edit the source. For more information look here.