You just “followed a link” to this page, either from another website (maybe, https://forum.docling.net), or perhaps from an email, or in a chat message, or whatever. You do this all the time. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself what is actually going on when you follow a link?

In some ways, the explanation is more familiar than you might expect. We are all familiar with the notion of “files” — basically some data which is saved on a hard-drive in a computer. And we have all also used so-called “desktop” applications to create and edit such files. To do this, the basic pattern goes: 1) run an application (usually by clicking on an icon), and then 2) use a menu to open a file that is stored somewhere on your own computer’s hard-drive. Let’s call this the desktop pattern. (I just made that up!)

The “web broser” application, however, is used differently. We generally don’t use the desktop pattern to open a file in a web browser, however. Instead, we do what you probably just did to read the current file: we follow links from some other site on the internet.

Now, you might be surprised to learn that you can use the “desktop pattern” on a browser. You go to File > Open just like you would in any other desktop application. This is great news, because it means that you can learn about how HTML works without having to know much about how the internet and websites and domains and all that stuff works — we can do that later. For now, let’s just learn some HTML.

One of the main jobs of a web browser (like the one you’re using now) is to read a text file in the HTML format, and then to figure out how each of the tags in that page should be displayed.

You might think that creating a web page would involve… well, somehow using the internet. But while that’s usually the case, it’s by no means necessarily the case. You can separate out the problem of learning how to create a web site into:

1. Learning to create HTML files.
2. Learning to “put” those HTML files “onto” the web. This is sometimes called “deployment” or “deploying” an HTML.

We’re not going to talk about deployment much at all here. We’re just going to learn to create a page that is stored on your computer. It’s an easy way to get started.

But of course, we’re linguists. So we want to create some documentation, not just any old page. So let’s do something real-ish. We’ll start with a very simple “corpus landing page”.

Here are some examples of what I mean by that: