HTML Basics
Stanford University Libraries & Academic Information Resources

How to use this Guide

This guide is designed to be read quickly in a linear fashion, by passing over all the hypertext links and using the 'NEXT' buttons on the toolbars at the top and bottom of each page. The hypertext links lead either to auxilliary background material (extra-credit reading), to digressions, to material you will encounter later if reading in a linear fashion, or to reference-type material. If you are in a hurry, read straight through and then, at your leisure, return to the top of the guide and follow whichever links interest you.

Even though HTML is a simple scheme, there is a fair amount of material and I've tried to arrange things so that, if you prefer, you can read just one or two pages a day without losing the thread.

In the toolbar that appears on each page there are buttons to take you to the next and previous pages in the sequence (which may not be the same as the 'back' and 'forward' buttons depending on how far you've wandered from the straight and narrow path. There is also a button labelled "Tech Guide". This button leads you to the Technical Reference Guide to the HTML 2.0 Document Type Definition (DTD). The DTD is the formal SGML structured description of the syntax of HTML documents. This Technical Reference Guide provides detailed discussion of the allowable uses of each of the elements and attributes defined in HTML. Parts of these descriptions are necessarily technical and are included for the benefit of Technical Services staff, Systems staff, and others who may need to get their hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of SGML. For authors, the element descriptions and "parent" and "contents" sections show in a diagramatic (tree) form (a) where an element may legally occur and (b) what other components it may contain. The term PCDATA (Parsed Character Data), is SGML jargon for what ordinary humans usually call "plain text" (i.e. not markup).

For the adventurous, you can examine the HTML markup used to prepare this guide, by using your browsers "Save as HTML" or "View source" commands (the exact commands vary from browser to browser). Every page in this guide is a perfectly legal HTML document (though not necessarily model of good HTML design). Of course this is a text on the subject of markup, and some of the markup is bound to be more complex than that which you'll use in your own writing. (You've been warned; go thou and have fun).

Printing

If you are an offline sort of reader a linear version of this guide is available, suitable for printing. Naturally, you won't be able to follow links, but if you like to read documentation in the jacuzzi, this version is probably safer than dragging along your pentium.