Joseph K. Myers
Saturday, April 13, 2002

Young WWW

  This is a how-to intended for young people, old people, and anyone who is "young" to the Internet and World Wide Web. It answers questions of publication, copyright, and many other things.
  If you are a lover of soft, fuzzy rabbit angora,* wool, or silk (especially if you hand-knit angora mittens in rich colors), a battle-worn veteran of Iwo Jima, or a hardened Japanese sailor who was *at* ground zero in Nagasaki, then read on.

  The original version of this document is written in text, the only "only way" to write anything. You can write like this if you can write an e-mail!
  You will be exposed to two things: HTML and Uploads
  HTML is termed a "markup" language, although it is really much simpler than English. "Upload"-ing is really the step where you have finished your work and put it online.

  As a start, forget what you've heard about "websites" being hard or easy. Thoughts like *that* _will_ make it hard.
  In the last sentence I put in some enriching and unusual marks. They don't really mean anything except to put an element of sarcasm or mockery into the word "that" and to emphasize the word "will"--as in it WILL be hard. HTML is much the same. If you want to scream, you can either scream, or <strong>scream</strong>! Now, the word "strong" probably tells you that the word will be STRONGly emphasized.
  For better or for worse, the creators of this "HTML" (HyperText Markup Language--Duh!) have made many "tags" like "strong" have short names. I guess they figured that "p" was easier to type than "paragraph," for example.

  Good documents do not need to use special characters, nor do they make heavy use of formatting tricks such as bold and italic text. (Nobody ever thought of such things when there were pens and paper only--bold is much to un-versatile!) If you need to make a special thing, be creative and do it with marks like /\^/\ (that's mountains, if you didn't know).

  After reading this, you should be encouraged that you already know most of what you need to know. No amount of my dry talk could teach you your English, anyway! If you write, you should know two basic marks, named "pre" for preformatted, and "p" for paragraph.

  If you'd like to make a snowflake, for example, simply do:

<pre>

  ...then draw your snowflake

   \ | /                   \ | /
     *    MERRY CHRISTMAS    *
   / | \                   / | \

</pre>

  Since you yourself are going to draw that, the computer doesn't need to do any more work. Such text is called "preformatted."

  The other mark, "p" for paragraphs, is probably less important to learn, but more important to use.

  You simply start your paragraph,

<p>
  keep writing more, more, and more,
</p>

  and then you stop.
  Writing the paragraph between those p-marks/p-tags (which, by the way, didn't have to be on a different line) allows the computer to re-wrap the text as necessary, as well as display it in nice-looking font.

  All these instructions could have been written without using a single HTML tag. Even changing it to HTML could have been done automatically--almost.
  The two examples of HTML had to be "hand-coded." It wasn't very hard, certainly, but otherwise you could have seen only what to do, not how it looks.

  *I liked my sister's sweater.