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The Science Division Developmental Pages at Bellevue Community College

Style Conventions

HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is an evolving standard that prescribes the way that WWW browsers, such as Netscape or Explorer or Lynx or Mosaic, are to present text or other types of information.

Unlike magazine editors, people who wish to publish web pages cannot control completely the way that their offerings will look. For example, Mosaic might render bold text the way you would expect, while Lynx might underline this text and another browser might be configured to show all bold text as red. Keep this in mind. You can get quite fancy if you want to, but you must use the tools the language offers - and be prepared for surprises when you look at the result with a browser.

Fortunately, one can reproduce most of the effects seen at typical web sites with no more than fifteen instructions, or "tags" as they are referred to by the cognescenti.

An example of a tag is to surround text with < b > in front and < /b > at the end of the text you want the browser to show as "bold." This is not brainbuster programming.

You could publish your first page within minutes of reading this and learn to use this short list of tags in one day or less. The documents above are intended to help you write "good" HTML. Please read them carefully.


Send email to Larry Susanka, the technical manager of this site, at lsusanka@bcc.ctc.edu.


This page was last modified on 9/11/02.
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