This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Comments
You can put comments into HTML pages to describe the page itself or to provide some kind of indication of the status of the page. Some source code control programs store the page status in comments, for example. Text in comments is ignored when the HTML file is parsed; comments don't ever show up onscreen—that's why they're comments. Comments look like the following:
<!-- This is a comment -->
Here are some examples:
<!-- Rewrite this section with less humor --> <!-- Neil helped with this section --> <!-- Go Tigers! -->
As you can see from Figure 4.4, users can view your comments using the View Source functionality in their browsers, so don't put anything in comments that you don't want them to see.
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Figure 4.4 HTML comments displayed within the source for a page.
Task: Exercise 4.1. Creating a Real HTML Page
At this point, you know enough to start creating simple HTML pages. You understand what HTML is, you've been introduced to a handful of tags, and you've even opened an HTML file in your browser. You haven't created any links yet, but you'll get to that soon enough, in Lesson 8, "Using CSS to Style a Site."
This exercise shows you how to create an HTML file that uses the tags you learned about up to this point. It gives you a feel for what the tags look like when they display onscreen and for the sorts of typical mistakes you're going to make. (Everyone makes them, and that's why using an HTML editor that does the typing for you is often helpful. The editor doesn't forget the closing tags, leave off the slash, or misspell the tag.)
So, create a simple example in your text editor. Your example doesn't have to say much of anything; all it needs to include are the structure tags, a title, a couple of headings, and a paragraph or two. Here's an example:
Input
<!DOCTYPE html><html> <head> <title>Camembert Incorporated</title> </head> <body> <h1>Camembert Incorporated</h1> <p>"Many's the long night I dreamed of cheese -- toasted, mostly." -- Robert Louis Stevenson</p> <h2>What We Do</h2> <p>We make cheese. Lots of cheese; more than eight tons of cheese a year.</p> <h2>Why We Do It</h2> <p>We are paid an awful lot of money by people who like cheese. So we make more.</p> </body> </html>
Save the example to an HTML file, open it in your browser, and see how it came out.
If you have access to a device other than a computer that has access to the Web, like a mobile phone, check out your page there as well, and take note of the differences between them. Figure 4.5 shows what the cheese factory example looks like.
Output
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Figure 4.5 The cheese factory example.