Simple HTML Guide

How to Write a Simple HTML Document

You don't need any fancy tools. You can write decent HTML using nothing more than your Notepad or Wordpad program.
At Elfwood, we don't want to see lots of different colours, fancy fonts, odd text sizes or even links in the stories. The simpler the formatting, the better.

For thorough help with respect to creating your own website and doing something slightly more advanced, try HTML Goodies or Webmonkey.

Meanwhile, here are some steps to writing a simple HTML document:

Open Notepad or Wordpad. First type this tag to mark the beginning of the document:
<html>
The next tag you type marks the beginning of your content:
<body>
Then you put in your actual story or poem:
- For a single line break (puts next line straight underneath), use the following tag:
 
- For a double line break (leaves one blank line between paragraphs), use these:
 a single paragraph of text
- Basic formatting tags (just change the text between the start tag and end tag):
 bold text
 italic text
 underlined text
 <center>centered text</center>
When you get to the end of your text, you need to mark the end of your content:
</body>
Then you need to mark the end of the document:
</html>
When you save the document, select "all file types" and put .html at the end of the file name. (story.html)
Double click on the document (open it) to see what it looks like in your internet browser, that is how it will look if uploaded to the internet.

Note that the start tag looks always like this: <tag> – that's where the formatted text or anything begins. An end tag will end the formatting and always look like this: </tag> – the slash (/) is very important.
Some tags work without an end tag: – it doesn't change the text, but instead creates a "special character" (linebreak).

Example

Here is an example document:

And this is how it will look like:

Title of My Story
The character was born.
The character lived an interesting life.
After dying, the character was reborn as an Asperugo procumbens.

Note that it doesn't matter if your text is on different lines in the original file on Notepad. Both of the options below will produce the same outcome: