When you are looking at a web page, you see pictures, text, forms, maybe video or animations. But every web page has an invisible foundation of coding, (text which tells the browser how to make the page).
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| Our Nettrain homepage | The beginning of the underlying code |
The most basic code is in "HTML" or "hyper-text markup language", but there are several other languages used to make web pages such as DHTML, XML, javascript, ASP and others.
When you have a web page open in your browser, you can look at the underlying code by choosing "view>source" or "view>page source".
There are two main ways of creating web pages, and they involve two kinds of "editors." If you are inclined to programming, you can simply use a text editor, and write the page in one of the languages mentioned above. For this method, a simple text editor will do, notepad or simpletext are perfectly adequate. There are some html text editors which make the job a little easier by doing things such as color-coding certain command types. A Google search will turn up many freeware, shareware and fully packed commercial versions.
If you would rather work visually, you can use a "wysiwyg" editor. Wysiwyg stands for "what you see is what you get." Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, Net Objects Fusion, and Microsoft Front Page are a few examples. These programs will allow you to arrange your image and text on the page without having to know any coding languages. Again, a Google search will show you many different possibilities.
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The page you are viewing was made in Dreamweaver. The higher end wysiwyg editors will allow you to do many very sophisticated operations, and most will allow you to add to the code yourself if you want to do something fancy that the editor doesn't do by default. This is the best of all possible worlds, allowing you to leave the simple, repetitive tasks up to the editor, but still allowing those who program to push the limits. |
Go to our Links section for some examples of editors and for
some good resource sites. 