At the Raiders we want to educate all of our viewers, exposing them to everything that our students have learned throughout the FIRST Robotics experience. We extend our own knowledge and experience to you in hopes that you too can pass on that knowledge to others. In this section of the site you can find several tutorials that will improve your own skills as well as your FIRST Robotics teams skills, we offer several tutorials ranging from Photoshop techniques, XHTML and PHP coding, and the C/C++ programming language.

HTML

• HTML Basics

Description: In this tutorial you will get a basic introduction to html mark-up language and information on what you need in order to start coding with it.

What is HTML?

HTML, Hypertext Mark-up Language, is the language of the World Wide Web today. In essence, it is the language which is used to create web pages for the world to view. Technically, HTML isn't actually a language, it is just plain English. (You will see what I mean by this later on.) If you truly want to understand web pages well, a basic understanding of HTML is quite essential.

The nice thing about HTML, is that it can be viewed and created on a Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and/or any other operating system. However, some computers and internet browsers may interpret certain tags differently. I will explain what tags are in the next lesson.

What do I need?

You would be surprised; you probably already have all of the tools that you will need. All you really need is a basic text editor, like Notepad, or WordPad programs. I prefer that you don't use a word processor, like Microsoft Word, or Works, as you will most likely run into many problems down the road, but what you choose is really up to you.

Some may say you should use an assistant program or wizard, like Dreamweaver, because it does alot of the work for you. However, you hardly learn anything doing it this way. You should start out doing it all by yourself.

I'm also assuming that you have some generic computer knowledge, as you probably wouldn't even be at this page or want to learn this if you didn't. You will also be using your web browser, like Internet Explorer, or Mozilla Firefox, to view pages that you have created with these tutorials.

Saving your Files

When you want to save any HTML document, make sure you DO NOT save it as a .txt file. You will need to go SAVE AS, or SAVE FILE AS. Do not just go to save, as it will then be in a .txt file format. Now, in the Save as type field, select All Files. In the files name field, type in the file name that you would like to save it as. Make sure you don't place any spaces in your file name! It is also best to use all lower case letters, so your visitors won't have to remember which letter(s) were capital or lower case. Now add the extension .htm or .html, it really doesn't matter which one you use at this point. But choose one and stick with it for all your pages on your website.

• HTML Flags and Structure

Description: In this tutorial you get a basic knowledge of html mark-up language flags and of their proper structure and format.

What are Flags?

Flags are basically sets of commands the web browser follows. For example, if you want to place a text sentence, you'd place a flag at the beginning and end of your sentence to show the browser how to render it. This rule applies for everything in HTML.

Flag Formats

All flags and/or commands have the same basic format. They always begin with a < and end in >. The tag (flag or command) goes inside these two symbols.

Ex. <b>I'm learning HTML!</b> gives you I'm learning HTML!

<b> Is the beginning flag that makes your text bold, </b> ends your command, and your text or object that is affected (usually called tags) goes inside.