HTML Primer February 07, 2002

The Long Essay Long Essay (25% - Due March 14 th -21 st ) A page (double-spaced) research paper on a topic within the field that interests you. Citations, Bibliography, the whole bit. It can expand upon or be an extension of ideas brought up in your Short Essay. Submitted in HTML format, using an appropriate layout of your own design.

Formatting your Essay Be sure to complete your essay prior to translating or formatting it in HTML. This will save you a huge amount of time and effort. You may use any HTML editor you are comfortable with, or you may hand-code, whichever you prefer. Consider the reader when you are designing your formatting. Just as you had with your rural library website, you will want to make your essay accessible and easily navigable.

Multiple Pages Do not fall into the trap of making your page essay one long, huge scrolling epic! Instead, plan on creating a series of HTML pages that will contain your text. You will, therefore, need to consider just how much text to put on a single page and how to move between the pages themselves. You may use any navigation scheme that you deem ‘user-friendly.’

Navigation The navigation used in your paper need not be any more elaborate than the navigation created during your rural library lab experience. Simply keep in mind that, your navigation should be: –Obvious—both in terms of its location on every page, its look, and what content/page it points to –Highly accessible –Meaningful—people should not have to guess where the link will take them.

Formatting Pages Format each HTML page so that the content will be visible (i.e., nothing spreading off the screen, either horizontally or vertically) at a monitor resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. You may need to alter your monitor’s preferences to ensure this, or, using an HTML editor, you might want to limit your HTML page to a size under 800 x 600 pixels (e.g., 720 x 480).

Text Formatting You may format the text as you see fit, including the use of: –Headers –Common text formats (e.g., bold, italics, etc.) –Fonts of your choice –Images, if desired or required Remember to keep the content readable. Emphasize ease of use rather than complexity of presentation.

Citations In terms of citations or notation, a standard used in almost every electronic journal is the use of HTML anchors to create links from the point in the text to a page of citations. Your citations can be formatted to any acknowledge bibliographic style (e.g., MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) The remainder of class will be spent on getting you up to speed with using anchors and citations. For those of you who already have ample experience with using anchors, you are free to go.

Anchors 101 If you are familiar with using links, then you already know the basics for using anchors. Anchors are simply textual markers that you place in your HTML text to delineate where a link should jump to. The first step in creating an anchor, then is creating that textual marker.

Anchors… cont’d To create markers in HTML, we use the anchor tag with the attribute NAME=“ yourmarker ”. –e.g. Place this HTML tag before the content you want to jump to (i.e., your citation), as in: –e.g. Barker, Bob. The price is right. Anchors do NOT use closing tags (e.g., )

Anchors… cont’d In this fashion, for every citation, you will want to create an anchor, placed just before it in your HTML code. Now, in the body of your text, you want to create a link (for each citation) that will jump directly to that anchor. You do this using the same tag that you would use for any link… with one important distinction.

Anchor Example Main Page: …Madeira states that this accusation is false, however. 1 … Jumps to citation.html: Barker, Bob. The Price is Right. New York: Nelson, Madeira, Anne. $25,000 Pyramid Toronto: Wiley,

Anchor Summary Use the tag to define your anchors. Always put the anchor just before the text you want your browser to jump to. – Text… Use the normal tag to link to the NAME by adding a # after the file name and then adding the anchor name. – 2

Anchors… cont’d Your tag will take you to the right page, but you need to specify the anchor you want to jump to. To do this, you add a hash mark (#) and the textual marker, or name, that you made up. –For example, –This will both take us to the right page and to the right citation.

Next Class When we return to classes, we will look at creating entities in XML, using empty elements, and incorporating other media (images, etc.)