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HOUR 4:Building a Home Page: A Look Behind the Curtain
Summary
In this hour, you took a trip behind the scenes and learned a bit about how an
HTML page works. You saw that the code boils down to wrapping the content in a
beginning and an end tag and that changing these tags can be done from Code
view and Design view. You got a preview of some of the code-editing tools available
in Expression Web 4, the Quick Tag Selector, and the Quick Tag Editor, and you also
learned how to import text content from external files and format the code so that it
matches the original document. In Hour 5, “Getting Connected with (Hyper)Links:
The Cornerstone of the World Wide Web,” you create a second page and add hyper-
links to your pages to make them interactive.
Q&A
Q. Why can’t I simply cut and paste the content from a Word document
straight into my web page?
A. A word processor such as Microsoft Word inserts a large amount of hidden
style code in documents. When you copy and paste text from these pro-
grams, all that code quite literally tags along. One example of this is pull
quotes. When you press the Tab key in a word processor to visually distin-
guish a long quote by indenting it, you actually insert a block of style code
defining how far in to indent the content. Therefore, when you copy and
paste the content to Expression Web 4, that style code follows along and
clutters up the code. This indentation code is unnecessary in HTML because
there is already a dedicated tag for long quotes called <blockquote>. To
avoid this problem, use the Paste Text command found under Edit on the
main menu. This command strips the style code from copied text and
inserts it as plain text with only the tags you request. Yes, using the Paste
Text command forces you to apply the different heading and other tags
manually, but it also ensures that all your code is up to standards, and
that’s what matters in the end.
Workshop
The Workshop has quiz questions and exercises to help you put to use what you just
learned. If you get stuck, the answers to the quiz questions are in the next section.
But try to answer them first. Otherwise, you’ll be cheating yourself.
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