This is a sequence of lessons designed to ease a beginner into writing his or her own webpages without using HTML editors. Although HTML editors, such as various commercial products whose names do not need mentioning, allow a user to quickly create pages with lots of formatting, they also throw in an awful lot of code that is not necessary, making the pages large and hard to maintain. In addition, it is sometimes hard when using them to make a page exactly how you would want it, and you will never learn HTML if you rely on them exclusively. Learning HTML and learning how to create web pages using a plain old text editor will empower you and allow you to create, maintain, and modify them easily.
Each of the links to the right opens a simple webpage in this frame of your window. When you click on "Lesson 1", for example, these instructions will be replaced by the page for Lesson 1. If you need these instructions again, click on the link labeled "Instructions."
When you click on the lesson link, you will see how the browser renders the page. You need to see the page source as well, because that contains the concepts and tools you need to understand how to use. To view the source, click on the link just under the lesson that is labeled "Lesson X source", where "X" is the lesson number.
The most effective way to use this tutorial is to repeatedly modify the source files and display them in the browser to see what the changes do. To do this, you will have to download the files to your computer's file system. You do this by right-clicking on the Lesson link in the browser and selecting the Save Link or Save As menu item, depending on which browser you are using. For your convenience, there is a zip file containing all of the pages that you can download and unzip to your file system. The link is below.
Once you have saved the pages to your file system, you can edit them using any old plain text editor. If you are using Windows, you can use NotePad or WordPad for example. If you are using Linux, you have many more choices. If you are using a Mac, you can use TextEdit, jEDit, or any similar plain text editor.
Because these files were created on a Linux system, they have different end-of-line characters than are used in Windows. If you use WordPad on Windows, they will display properly. With NotePad, they will not display properly. It is better to use WordPad to open them.