How to create a new web page?

CREATE A NEW WEB PAGE

Create a new web page by pulling down the “File” menu, choosing the “New” submenu, and then the

“Composer Page” item. This brings up a blank page.

You can also choose “Composer” from the “Window” menu and then use the normal “File:Open”

menu item to open an existing file. If you wish to start from a page on the web, you can view that

page using Netscape’s browser, and then choose “Edit Page” from the “File” menu. This will open

the page in Netscape Composer, where you can make whatever changes you wish and then save it to

your local hard drive.

Paragraph Tags

Netscape allows you to have “unstyled” text, text that doesn’t belong to any “paragraph-level”

formatting. It calls this “Body Text”. In general, you shouldn’t do this. All of your text should be part

of a paragraph, a heading, a list, a table, or some paragraph-level style. You should avoid the “Body

Text” feature in HTML if you are creating professional web pages.

HTML tags “mean” something about the text that they enclose. Paragraph tags do not specify line

breaks. They specify that the enclosed text is a paragraph. Different browsers will display paragraphs

in different manners. Similarly, for headlines you do not specify a large font with bold as you do in a

word processor, but simply that the text is a headline. There are a large variety of browsers available.

A cell phone might display headlines differently than a larger browser, and an audio reader will likely

display headlines in a completely different, non-visual manner.

By using tags that impart meaning to the text they enclose, browsers can more effectively display

your information to a wider variety of readers, whether those readers speak the language the text was

written in, whether they are viewing it on tiny or large displays, and whether they are viewing it at all

instead of listening to it or touching it.

The typographical command to indent some text by three spaces and use a smaller font for quoted

text means nothing to an audio reader, and if followed slavishly by a personal digital assistant could

render a document unreadable. But the tag that specifies that the text is quoted text can be rendered

appropriately according to the viewer’s needs.

Paragraphs

Set a paragraph by highlighting some text in a paragraph and choosing “paragraph” from the style

menu.

Headlines

The “Heading” styles are levels of headlines for your pages. In most visual web browsers, headlines

will be shown as bold in large text, with extra space above and below.

4—Create a new web page

You can think of headlines as sort of an outline of your page. Things that would be on the same level

in an outline will have the same “heading” number. Your main headline is usually heading 1. You will

often only have one heading 1 on your page. Your main sections will probably each have a heading 2.

Sections within those sections will each have a heading 3, and so on. While there are headings going

all the way to heading 6, if you have headings 4 or higher you may wish to consider breaking your

page into multiple pages and “promoting” each heading to a higher level.

Each heading level is generally displayed as slightly smaller than the previous level. Heading level 1

is the largest, heading level 2 is slightly smaller, heading level 3 is slightly smaller than that, and so

on. Search engines also will use headlines to assist them while indexing a web page’s keywords. Your

headlines should be short and informative, precisely describing the topic that follows.

Here, we have one heading 1 giving the title of the web page, followed by two heading 2 headlines

describing two musicians.

Your Page

Go ahead and create your own web page. Give it one level one headline and several one- or two-

paragraph sections. Precede each section with a level two headline.

Character Tags

Character-level tags are like italics or bold in your word processor. They are styles that can be

applied to individual characters, and do not have to affect an entire paragraph.

Like paragraph level tags, where you want to use tags that “mean something”, you don’t want to use

simply “italics” to italicize both emphasized text and citations. You’ll want to use the tag for

emphasis when you want the text emphasized, and for citations when you are “italicizing” a citation

reference.