This short Course in basic HTML and CSS teaches a useful range of skills to complete newcomers. It also shows how a Web Browser can be an interactive Personal Tutor.

Each session is in a self-contained browser "page", and once it's fully loaded in your Browser, you can work offline if you prefer (for details, click here).

Syllabus for the – Introduction - Making some notes to mark up:

 Get Introduced  This Course probably isn't like anything else you've met on the Web. That's why there's an interactive . In this Session you create a small file of plain text notes for use in Lessons 1 and 2, and practise all the interactive features:

• InfoBox – supplies extra details quickly and unobtrusively
• CueWindow – a dynamic note to make study easier
• Lookup box – context-sensitive help on technical terms

Syllabus for – Plain Text into HTML:

 HyperText Markup Language  Mark up a plain text file to HTML in small, easy-to-follow steps, with an interactive check on your results at each step:

• Structure of an HTML document
• Giving a document a Title
• How to format plain text as HTML very quickly when needed
• Centring text for headings and footnotes
• Placing text in paragraphs
• Inserting line breaks and white space
• Creating lists:
  • Definition lists
  • Ordered lists
  • Unordered lists
• Non-breaking spaces and word wrap control
• Using the LookUp box Course Reference in a pull-down box

Syllabus for – Adding Style with CSS:

 Cascading Style Sheets  Applying CSS rules step-by-step, with an interactive check on your results at each step:

• Creating a <style> section in the document Head
• Changing defaults for the document Body
• Using the font-family rule to select fonts
• Specifying font-size by em-heights
• Changing text colour with the color rule
• Using the background-color rule
• Selecting colours with:
  • the 140 standard Colour Names
  • the decimal or hex RGB values
• Using the <b> tag for emboldening text
• Using font-weight as an alternative to the <b> tag
• Creating custom mixes of colours, backgrounds, and fonts with:
  • the <span> tag for inline spans of text
  • the <div> tag for blocks of text
• Defining a re-usable Class of rules to apply to several tags
• Using multiple rules inside a tag to customise it

 
For those who want to study further, these are two books we've found useful:

• HTML The Definitive Guide 3rd Edition, by Musciano & Kennedy.
  Published O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN 1-56592-492-4
• Cascading Style Sheets The Definitive Guide, by Meyer
  Published O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN 1-56592-622-6

The standards are set by the World Wide Web Consortium. From their Website you can get detailed specifications for HTML and CSS.

You can also read about the new Document Object Model standard, which is the latest attempt to standardise the way different Browsers render Web pages. The recent versions of most Browsers now comply (more or less!) with this new standard.

 
As well as this short Course of HTML for newcomers, there's a free, full-scale Course on a different subject that you can try. We've developed a that can teach a complete newcomer how to write MS-DOS Batch files in 21 one-hour sessions.

These free demonstrations are intended to show how our specialised Creative Technical Writing techniques can make learning easy, quick, and above all, interesting. If you want to know more, you can read about the services we offer.