I first learned how websites work when I was in junior high school. Just another awkward day for a teenager in midwestern suburbia, I was presented a few pieces of paper stapled together that contained the “basics” for coding a web page in HTML. There was something intriguing about the fact that a basic web page could be created with just a few lines of simple code.
<html>
<head>
<title>The Page Title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1><font color="#0000FF">A Blue Headline</font></h1>
I can't believe this is all the code you need.
</body>
</html>After practicing with that lesson and then dabbling with a Geocities site or two, I gained an appreciation for the language that enabled creative visual expression to be a part of this relatively new phenomenon called the internet.
Compared to the Spanish I was beginning to learn at the time, this seemed really quite simple though not without its quirks. It is curious how some tags were spelled out like head, body, and color; meanwhile others had cryptic abbreviations like img, a, or href, not to mention the hex codes.
I still like to bust out the <center> and <marquee> tags on occasion just to see if they still work.
<!-- Begin Old Skool HTML Code -->
<center><font color="green" face="arial">Don't worry...
<marquee>They still work!</marquee>
</font>
</center>Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane. I’ll try to see if I have that original resource somewhere as it would be nice to recognize it and maybe it could still help people get started learning HTML. I’d love to hear about your first experiences making websites.