Writing the Document
A web page is written as a plain text file. That means you can write it with a text editor such as Notepad, Notepad++, etc. You do not need a special web page builder or tool to create pages. Those can make it a little easier, but often cost a lot more money.
You must avoid using word processing tools like MS Word, Write, Google Docs, etc. Each of those editors has their own file format, which is incompatible with the plain text format of a web page. A web browser won’t be able to read the file.
Exporting the Page?
Don’t be tempted to “Save As” or “Export” a file as HTML.
First, if you build your tags in a word processor, you’ll see the tags, and not a web page.
Second, if you try to build the page, and export, you’ll find that a bunch of unnecessary tags and classes that gets added in. Depending upon the tool, you could be looking at anywhere from a few to over 40,000 extra unnecessary characters that it will cram into your web page, making it a challenge to update inside of a text editor.
Finally, producing a good layout for the page is nearly impossible in a word processing tool, which will actually make anything but standalone pages harder to build.
Whitespace – Friend or Foe
HTML documents do not care about whitespace – that is spaces, tabs, carriage returns, etc. Whitespace is found between tags, words, etc. Once a browser sees a whitespace character, it ignores all other whitespace characters.
Removing whitespace will make a web page smaller, and therefore faster to download. However, that isn’t nearly as important now-a-days for two reasons.
One Internet speeds have increased, meaning users can download files much faster, and two – many webpages are compressed before being sent, much like zipping a file. This minimizes the effect of the whitespace down to next to nothing. At the same time, removing whitespace can make the page hard to edit, especially if you are not using a web page editor to edit the page.
As a general rule, web page builders will often indent blocks of embedded information to make it easier to read and edit the code. If you are working on a project of any size, being able to come back after a break and finish is extremely important.
Writing an HTML Page was originally found on Access 2 Learn
