Learning HTML

[SingleT]

Hello everyone!

I'm planning on starting to work on some webpages, and am curious if anybody knows where I can find a guide to start using HTML. I know books are generally a great source, but I am looking for something online, or a pdf file perhaps. If anybody can help or make suggestions, I would appriciate it.

 

[HorsePunchKid]

You might take a look at w3schools' tutorial. They're a pretty good one-stop-shop for all of your web-related tutorial needs. They've also got a decent set of links to other online resources for when you outgrow their generally introductory-level material.

My only advice is to start learning HTML using a plain-text editor (e.g. NotePad or vim, though other people here can suggest better text editors to use that are more beginner-friendly). Don't jump straight into using FrontPage or Dreamweaver or other WYSIWYG editors. They will obscure some of the underlying details that are important to learn, in my opinion. (Like learning how to use a calculator before you learn your multiplication tables... )

 

[I_Need_Money]

I highly recommend HTML Dog. Besides having one of the most awesome layouts I've ever seen, the guides are really great because they focus on teaching standards-compliant HTML. Here's a quote from the site explaining why the author writes his guides the way he does:

The underlying philosophy behind this website is to focus standards-compliant HTML and CSS (as established and maintained by their founding fathers and guardian angels - The World Wide Web Consortium) but without making a big deal about it. The current way of learning HTML seems to be to learn it the old, non-standard hack way and then, if so inclined (which most probably wouldn't be), to learn about standards at a later date. But I can't see any reason not to teach standards compliant HTML and CSS from the bottom up without saying there's anything special about it - it's just the way it's done.

Standards compliance is important. Following the way it should be done as opposed to smashing round pegs into square holes with a sledge hammer will result in cleaner, future-proof code that is accessible to users with disabilities, can be maintained more easily and quickly and will result in much lighter pages that download that much quicker.

My only complaint is that the site doesn't have enough examples. And if you want to have a better visualization of what this or that tag does then you'll have to paste the code on to an editor and preview the effects yourself because the site itself doesn't have many pictures showing the results.

Besides that I'd like to back up HorsePunchKid on his recommendation of the tutorials at w3schools.