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Virginia's HTML—Headings

©2005, Martin Rinehart html-intro-02.html

Today we'll make some of the dullness disappear.

Open virginia.html in your text editor and in a browser. Position both so that you can easily click from one to the other.

Headings

Now look at this page. At the top it says "Virginia's HTML . . . " in a rather large font. That's a heading. Specifically, it's done with the <H1> tag. Headings range from <H1> through <H6>. The copyright line is also a heading. They're done this way:

<H1 ALIGN="center">Virginia's HTML . . . </H1>
<H4 ALIGN="right">&copy;2005, . . . </H4>

That "ALIGN=" thingie is called an "attribute" of the <H1> tag. The "&copy;" is called a "character entity"—it comes out as the copyright symbol. Character entities all start with an ampersand and end with a semicolon. In between are some letters that suggest the end result. The long dash in the preceding sentence is an "em dash" in English, or "&mdash;" in HTML.

Fun with Headings

Use copy and paste to get half a dozen copies of the "This is Virginia's . . ." sentence. Then add headings <H1> through <H6>, with different alignments, like this:

<H1 ALIGN="center">This is Virginia's first web page.</H1>
<H2 ALIGN="left">This is Virginia's first web page.</H2>
<H3 ALIGN="right">This is Virginia's first web page.</H3>
<H4 ALIGN="center">This is Virginia's first web page.</H4>
<H5 ALIGN="right">This is Virginia's first web page.</H5>
<H6 ALIGN="somewhere">This is Virginia's first web page.</H6>

In your browser, reload the page and see what you've got. I've got this:

This is Virginia's first web page.

This is Virginia's first web page.

This is Virginia's first web page.

This is Virginia's first web page.

This is Virginia's first web page.
This is Virginia's first web page.

Two items here. First, headings 5 and 6 are pretty small. Many people won't be able to read them, so stay away, if possible. Second is the alignment (ALIGN="somewhere") of the <H6> heading. Legal values for the ALIGN attribute are "left", "center" and "right". Anything else is ignored and you get the default left alignment. (No error message or other warning—type carefully.)

Adding Italics

Suppose you wanted to emphasize the fact that this was your first web page. You'd surround the word first with italic tags: <I>first</I>. Try that in your text editor, save and reload the page in the browser.

Got it? Mine looks like this:

This is Virginia's first web page.

This is Virginia's first web page.

This is Virginia's first web page.

This is Virginia's first web page.

This is Virginia's first web page.
This is Virginia's first web page.

Thinking Ahead

We've added some dance to this page. It was a stupid, dull page. Now it's still stupid, but not so dull. Tomorrow I'll show you how to add some color. But in the mean time, start thinking about real, not stupid, content. When someone Google's "Virginia Rinehart" they'll find this page (when you register with the search engines). What do you want them to find out?

Remember that there are a lot of audiences out there. The researcher could be one of your peers, a professor, a potential employer, someone searching for a tennis partner or someone who wants to hire you to teach their kid(s) to play tennis. In many cases this page could be their first encounter—first impressions matter.

Think about what you want the page to say.

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