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Creating Your Own Web Pages

There are lots of good (and even more bad) web pages that tell you how to write HTML. Now that you know how to look at web pages, you might want to look at http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/web/weblore.html#authoring. It contains a list of several on-line tutorials and guides to HTML, among other things. Be warned that some of the information there may be outdated. An updated version is under construction.

Note that in the yellow form (discussed in section 1.6.3 on page ) which you signed before getting an account on the School's computers, there is a section which states, in part:

Be advised that the following are not allowed:

• Using the facilities for commercial purposes, or for preparing, storing or displaying racist or other offensive material. This includes displaying pornographic or offensive images as screen backgrounds.
• Storing copyright material in a publically accessible place. Note that anything written by somebody else is copyrighted to them and may not be reproduced without permission. This includes graphics.

You should keep this in mind when designing web pages. Your web pages should not contain offensive or copyright material, or be used for commercial purposes. If your web pages have a detrimental effect on the School's network or the image of the University, you will be asked to remove them. You may also be in breach of the rules relating to the student use of electronic facilities as well as the yellow form. See section 1.6.3 on page  for more details.

To create a web page, you just need to make a text document containing HTML commands and text. The HTML source code for a very minimal web page is shown in figure 5.1. You can use your favourite editor to compose a web page or you can use a program such as composer to create or modify it.

You can expand your knowledge of HTML by examining the way other people have written their pages. To see the source code (HTML) of the web page you are looking at in Mozilla (and Mozilla-Firefox), simply go to View:Page Source.

Figure 5.1: A very simple HTML document.

For your web pages to be visible to you and to the rest of the world, they will need to be placed in a directory called public_html in your home directory. This directory (and your home directory) must be world-executable, and the HTML files must be world-readable (see section 2.2.16 on page ). Note also that if your HTML files do not end with one of the suffixes .html or .htm, they may not be recognised as HTML files by all browsers.

Figure 5.2 shows a directory listing from the public_html directory of a user called markn. This listing illustrates the required permissions for your public_html directory and the .html files you put there.

Figure: Example public_html listing.

The URL for a file file.html in the public_html directory of an account belonging to the user pats777 would be:

        http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/ pats777/file.html

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