1What is online journalism? - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

154 Journalism Online
rarely write their own HTML (known, in a touching throwback to
pre-industrial times, as hand coding). They prefer automated web
authoring systems such as Microsoft Frontpage and Macromedia’s
Dreamweaver, which write the entire HTML for them.
These are known as WYSIWYG or Wizzy-wig packages – the
abbreviation stands for What You See Is What You Get. These
user-friendly systems allow you to type in what you hope your
page will look like in the end, without distracting you with the
HTML it is generating to get the page to work. The HMTL is all
there, but you just do not see it, unless you ask to.
You could create that page entirely out of hand coding, with
links to the relevant graphics and picture files. On the other hand,
you may be too busy with other things or perhaps you are just not
interested in doing this.
You probably do not want to build the site by hand. However, if
you know enough HTML to spot a problem caused by the
automated system and even to try to correct it, you may have
reached that rare state of harmony between man and machine.
You may have got the balance right.
Exercise 1 – a simple page
Open Notepad and Internet Explorer (or whatever browser you
are using) and arrange the windows so you can see both without
having to switch between the two.
In Notepad, type the following and save it as HTML1.htm
Small Document
This is a test to see what the minimum HTML code will
display on a browser.
Open the file in your browser and view the result.
You do not need very much code to display text on the screen.
The < > symbols surround the tags that tell the browser how to
display a page. So ‘Small Document’ is put in the title bar.
The browser reads the HTML file character, line by line, in a
process called ‘parsing’. So the use of spaces is very limited. Put
more than one space between words and the browser will ignore