HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, is a code based language for describing the content of web pages. HTML is used to write documents that contain a series of instructions, including the actual text content that users see; these documents are HTML documents, or web pages. Web browsers “speak” the language of HTML, and are able to read the commands contained within HTML documents; web browsers display HTML documents as web pages.
W3Schools offers information about HTML and creating web pages at www.w3schools.com/html, and offers users a free opportunity to learn from HTML tutorials that include interactive creation of mock web pages, simply by allowing the user to manipulate the plain text version of an HTML document and see the resulting document rendered as a web page. HTML is fairly straightforward; however, this author’s very limited experience with HTML revealed that it is not easy to create attractive, sophisticated web pages by writing HTML documents, character by character. Professional web authors use software programs, or web development applications, that facilitate the process of creating HTML documents. However, it is possible to create and publish web pages simply by hand coding HTML, and the webmonkey’s HTML cheatsheet provides a quick and useable guide to the most commonly used HTML tags and their proper syntax, which must be perfect in order for the page to render correctly.
Cascading style sheets, or CSS, define how the elements of HTML documents are displayed. Whereas HTML is used to write the content of a web page, and format it in terms of whether certain text is shown as a section heading or a paragraph, CSS is used to define the format and layout of web pages. CSS defines HTML elements such as colors and fonts throughout the document by adding in to the document a set of commands that impact different parts of the HTML document; this set of commands is a “style sheet” that can be edited, and therefore alter colors, fonts, etc throughout the document. This allows web authors to render an HTML document’s text in different fonts, colors, and so on without having to code each and every single formatting element for every single word. See CSS in action by clicking here.
As web based resources and services become increasingly important for libraries, web authoring is a skill that is of increasing relevance to the work of librarians. Some libraries employ web development librarians who work to ensure the quality of the library’s various web applications. Goans, Leach, and Vogel (2006, 30) discuss a particularly interesting issue that arose at the Georgia State Library as a result of numerous librarians contributing HTML documents that “were extremely diverse on an individual level”; each librarian used different fonts, colors, and layouts in the creation of research guides for library users. This article notes the value of a content management system (CMS) that allowed the various librarians involved to create their research guides in a form-based module, which allowed the librarians to avoid making decisions regarding font, color, layout, etc, and instead ensured that all of the guides were visually consistent.
Referenced Work
Goans, Doug, Guy Leach, and Teri Vogel. 2006. "Beyond HTML: Developing and re-imagining library web guides in a content management system". Library Hi Tech, 24 (1): 29-53.
