HTML "Banging Head"

You don't have to hate HMTL!

Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML, isn't that hard to understand.

Take the "banging head" above, for example. Long ago, I discovered this humorous little icon on both Animated GIFs and the Just Say No Directory web pages. Since then, I've used it as the default icon for folders containing everything from "Testing materials" to "To Do" lists. Adding an animated GIF to this blog was just a matter of stripping the code of its extraneous elements until I got just the look I wanted. In case you would like the HTML coding for the banging-head.gif, just learn how to view code, copy/paste it, and play with it. (I created the image to the upper right using MSoffice Word 2004 for Mac formatting tools.)


It's fun to play around with the HTML coding of web pages. Though I've never taken a serious interest in studying HTML, I've learned enough to "borrow" source coding from any web page.

For example, using the Firefox browser, you can view source code by accessing the View Menu and selecting "Page Source." Doing so allows you to view web page coding. With practice, you'll learn to identify the head, body, and various elements within any web page. Blogger allows for two viewing options as I create this post that may help to make this visual point. Let's compare!

Here's the beginning of this blog as it looks in the Compose View.










And, here's the same thing from the "Edit HTML" view. As I said, with practice, you can quickly make sense of the HTML. It's pretty easy to identify the text portion at the bottom.











Some of my colleagues may still groan, "But HTML is no fun!" I disagree. Learning about HTML can be fun. Plus, it can save editing time when you understand some basic web design principles. Sure, you may get a headache from thinking to hard, but that's better than picturing this scene.