Contents | Glossary

Preface

This manual is not intended to be a mother-of-all HTML reference guide covering every idiosyncrasy and arcane tag available. If you are looking for large, comprehensive HTML/Web books, check out Appendix B for a list of books that I have found helpful and amusing. Instead this document is meant to be a starting point for students and staff who want someplace to begin. In this manual we will be focusing on "standard" tags. Despite the use of the Netscape browser we will not be using any of its unique tags, although some of the author's favorite "non-standard" tags are included in section 3. Again, my reasoning is that it is your page's content that matters, not its fancy fonts or huge graphics.

Your author's experience with the web first started a cold winter night late in February of 1994. That night Loren Aman excitedly showed a shaky beta version of NCSA Mosaic to him and his roommate Mike Bitz. The two were not impressed. It was slow, klunky, and crashed a lot. But they saw the potential, and in the next week they would print out hundreds of pages of documentation and stay up many nights figuring out what each tag's purpose was. It is my express purpose in writing this document that you will not have to waste such a god-awful amount of time.

From those humble beginnings DSU's web site would grow and become one of the best available. The World-Wide Web also grew and became the mighty web that we hear about in the media almost daily. And while your author would like to think that he had some part in it, he was really just a small cog in a much larger machine. While the Internet will never be able to replace all of the wonders of our natural world it will (hopefully) allow individuals around the world to share ideas and information, enriching all of our lives.

Anthony Anderberg - 11/15/95