Understanding the Importance of Text

The importance of using “text” cannot be stressed enough. Text is visible when you read letters on your computer but it is also present within images and icons on your computer screen. The human brain registers this as text but search engines see only an image reference and ignore this when spidering your site so any text within the image is transparent to them. Do not rely on text embedded into images and always put an accompanying text link with an image where possible - including within the ALT tag.

You will probably have also come across writing HTML in your training classes or books and you would have likely have used a simple “text” editor for web pages.

Lets us go through some types of texts. Some of the well-known types of text formats are:

Notepad or Simpletext files
Word documents
Acrobat files (PDF)
Graphics (that include text)
Web pages or HTML

Notepad or Simpletext files

These are programs that write standard text your computer recognises. Notepad is for Windows while Simpletext is for Macintosh. Anything written using Notepad or Simpletext is basically ASCII text, which is an unformatted and simple letter format that your computer reads. Notepad or Simpletext can be used for writing web pages and for scripts like PHP or PERL/CGI. Basically on the PC Notepad is written with .TXT extension while on Mac Simpletext files have Simpletext icon and .TXT extension.

Word Documents

These are more complicated file formats and have the option to change the look and feel of your text according to your page design. For instance you can change the font, font size, shape, colour, face, lines, paragraphs, etc. Besides this you can also insert graphics and images into these documents. When you write something on the word document, you are writing text with hidden code embedded in the document which instructs your computer to change the size, shape, font, graphic, colour, etc., according to what you write. When you want to use Word to write your Web documents, the only way is to save the document as text and write out the HTML or use the included functions within Word now has to save and format as a Web page. Word documents, on the PC, have the extension .DOC while on Mac, Word documents use the Word icon and can have the .DOC extension.

Acrobat Files

These files are written in many ways. For example, you can use the Acrobat program to develop your files directly, but the commonest way is to layout your document in a layout program or word processor. Then the document can be printed to the Acrobat file. Acrobat is basically a proprietary document layout format. Generally the PDF files are like images to which nothing can be done except viewing. It can be edited only if you have the editing program, Adobe Acrobat and Distiller. For the computer’s sake, the text in PDF files has been changed and encoded into a PDF file format that can be read by Acrobat Reader, and edited by Acrobat. PDF files take the .PDF extension and may have the Acrobat icon. HTML files cannot be written with Adobe Acrobat.

Text on Graphics

When you write text on Graphics that go on Web pages, your computer will no longer differentiate the text to be a character or word. It becomes only a part of the image. Graphics are built in a graphics program such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Though the graphic files have many extensions, the commonest ones on the Web include .GIF and .JPG extensions.

HTML Files

These are like Notepad and Simpletext files but with a chief variation. In HTML files you add special codes within brackets or 'tags' such as < and > which the HTML parser (reader) understands as code and converts into commands that your browser will follow. It means you are writing a lot of special codes and information to generate instructions for your browser to fetch and image file or display text or link to another page or generate a table layout of cells - it can get very complicated and is not particularly easy using just a text editor though many professionals use only such editors to write html code.

HTML files can be written with several different programs that look like Word and hide all the HTML tags. These are called WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get) and typical examples are MS FrontPage and Dreamweaver. With these types of programs you can work on a page that resembles your finished html page and drag and drop images etc into position - the program generates the code behind the scenes leaving you to concentrate on layout and design. In other programs the html is written directly but the tags are colour encoded and makes them much easier to follow. Tags need to be opened and closed around a command so colour coding the tags makes it easy to identify where a tag hasn't been properly closed as this would either prevent the html for working properly or not at all in some cases.

An example tag arrangement to generate an image on your browser could be:

This tells the browser that it should load an image (img) and not to put a border around it and it will find the image on the webserver at location 'images/photog8sm.jpg' which is an image called 'photog8sm.jpg' in directory 'images' - it also tell the browser it should display the image with a height of 130 pixels and a width of 100 pixels.

Notice the opening bracket '<' and the closing bracket '>' around the command set.

To set this image to act as a link to a webpage or another site the tag would be changed to something like:

We don't intend to produce an HTML tutorial here as there are countless resources available on the Internet to begin learning html coding. Suffice to say that the majority of web designers would rather use a WYSIWYG editor of some description if only for the time saving it provides. It is likely the way you will start and within these programs you can inspect the resulting code that is generated and learn from this how pages are formed.