Starting with HTML Web pages are ordinary files with “.htm” or “.html” file extensions. They contain a code named "hyper text mark-up language" or html. This codes when viewed in a browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox or other web browsers will be seen as a web page. Web pages you see in a browser might seem simple, but the code under the web page may sometimes be complicated. To design an html web page you have two options: You can use a web page editor like Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe Dreamweaver or similar to create web pages. Webpage editor software works like Microsoft Word™ (a complicated editor program used for creating and editing pages of books, letters etc.). You just type text, insert graphics and finally save your document as an html extension. Web page design software will generate the html code in background and saves it in html file. Designing web pages in such software can be very easy. But if you are going to create dynamic, well designed, professional web pages you will find that this is not a good option. A professional web developer needs to understand the html code itself very well. Second option is to learn html codes and write html pages in a simple text editor. As mentioned earlier, your codes will be seen as WebPages when viewed in a web browser. After you have learned html code and you are confident about your HTML knowledge, you can use web page design software like Dreamweaver to speed up the process of editing pages. Reasons why we should write HTML code If you want to design professional web pages, using web page design software alone will not be enough. You must be familiar with html codes to perform small modifications to the generated code. Code generated by these software packages is sometimes big and chaotic and maintaining such code is difficult. You will need to modify the code and optimize it or even write the code without their help. If you want to design dynamic web pages (as in most of the websites) you will need to know html codes to be able to generate it programmatically. If you want to use forms in your pages to send information to your own or someone else’s server and return result pages back to browser you will need to know html codes. For this course you will need a simple text editor to write html codes. For example you can use notepad or better still notepad++ in windows or any text editor in other operating systems. You will also need a browser like Internet explorer or Mozilla Firefox. In this course we will assume that you are working in Windows 9X/NT/2000/XP/Vista/7.

-->