Learning From Others: Viewing Source Documents

---

Every page that you view on your Website (and the World Wide Web) has an underlying source document containing HTML tags. These HTML tags describe to the browser how to display the page.

Normally, you never see the source document -- you just see the finished page that it's responsible for. However, every browser gives you the ability to view the source document in its wild, untamed form.

How you do this depends on your browser. Many browsers have a menu bar at the top of the screen, and by selecting the proper menu item you can have the source document displayed for you. (For example: if you are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, choose VIEW from the menu bar, then select SOURCE from the resulting pull-down menu.)

Why would you even want to view the source document? Because it's a great way to learn HTML. By examining the source document of a particularly compelling and well-designed page -- and by knowing how to interpret HTML -- you can learn how to construct a similar page for yourself.

Adventure

View the source document for this page. You may not understand all the HTML yet -- this page uses some advanced techniques -- but notice how it's constructed and how you can actually read some of the words. One of the lines in the source document contains a comment tag. It begins with a left bracket, followed by an exclamation point and two dashes. Find the comment line in the source document and be rewarded with a secret, inspirational message. (Note: As the name implies, the text within a comment line does not appear in the browser -- it's merely for HTML sleuths like you to look at. Actually, comments have a very constructive purpose: to describe especially tricky HTML in case someone other than the original author has to make modifications later.) In the next lesson, we'll start to learn some of the HTML tags.

This Web site, all content and related materials, are ©2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 by Jody Croley Jones