Before You Start Web DataBasing- Some HTML Basics

Before You Start Web DataBasing- Some HTML Basics

One of the first things that you are going to have to understand a bit better before putting your database on the internet is HTML. As most of the methods that you will use to interact with your database will be derived from a HTML skeleton, you will need to be able to find your way around the HTML.

So how do you start learning HTML. As it is extremely likely that you already have a powerful WYSIWYG based HTML editor already, you really do not have to start learning it from scratch.

Open the file called 02Demo.htm in the download file

So lets pull apart an ultra basic Web Form. Click here to open the demo form in your html editor or text editor. Now view the HTML code rather than the WYSIWYG view.

Initially you will find the content of the page broken up into sections that have a Starting Tag and an Ending Tag. Take for example the Title of the page.

<title>Example HTML For Database Training</title>

This has a Tag called Title which is surrounded by the <> brackets. The end of the title of the page is show by the </title> tag. Tags are always enclosed in the <brackets>

This Title section is stored inside another section called the Head section. Head is part of the document that is used for storing information about the page that are not actually displayed in the browser.

Displaying Information

Now everything that will be visible to the users of your page is stored in a section called <Body> The HTML for your most basic first page could look like this

<BODY>This is my first page </BODY>

If you are using a smart HTML editor, you will probably find that that the editor will add some other necessary Tags to the page prior to allow you to save and display the page. The HTML could look like the following

<html>

<body>

<p>This is my first page </p>

</body>

</html>

So now I have to explain two new tags

<html> Is the tag that says the document starts here and </html> is the end of document

<p> is the tag that is used for a new paragraph.

<BR> is the tag that will make the text jump to the next line.

<IMG SRC="sydney.jpg"> Images are displayed in your form using a IMG tag. They can refer to a number of different file types but most browsers will only support GIF and JPG formats.

The only other thing that you need to know at this stage is that your HTML can appear in your document anyway you want to organise it. HTML processor only read the information between the tags and just do not care whether you have 3 lines between each paragraph or whether all the paragraphs are on the one physical line.

But if you are going to start writing software that produces HTML, you had better organise it into a nice layout before you start.

That wasn't rocket science but it all had to be said !!

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Published 1999-05