What is HTML Tags?
Yes, you guessed it- they are quite different from the ones hanging from that new shirt you bought. A tag tells the browser what and how to show the HTML document to the viewer. A tag is a sort of a computer code which is differentiated from the text using: < & >. HTML is not case sensitive so that <H1> is the same as <h1>. The general format is:
<name of the tag>text, graphic</name of the tag>
For example every HTML file starts with:
<html> and ends with </html>
You must have noticed the "/". It's used to tell the browser to stop implementing the function defined by the tag name. For example the HTML for the heading above is:
<H3>Tags?</H3>
If I had omitted "/" the rest of the document would also have had been in <H3>.
I will not ask you to open up Notepad. However, if you want to practice out the stuff strutted out here feel free to do so.
Ok here's an example:
<html>
<head>
<title>My Home Page</title>
</head>
<body>
All your text and graphics lie within these body tags.
</body>
</Html>
To view this as HTML save it in Notepad with the extension= .html. For example if I wanted to save this file as "Test" I would type Test.html to save the file. Then I could open this file in a browser to view this file as HTML. If you do so you'll notice that nothing in the tags is displayed in the browser. The reason is simple- nothing enclosed by < & > is displayed by the browser. You could even have secret messages enclosed in < & > that could only be seen by anybody who bothers to have a look at the file's HTML source code! Go ahead check my source and you'll find my secret message.
Anything within the <head> tag is also not shown on screen. The <title> tag within the <head> tag is used for diplaying the title of the page in the browser title bar. Before <html> you might want to paste this: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
It does not matter if you include this or not. All it does is tell the browser that the document follows HTML ver. 3.2 rules. These are followed by both Microsoft and Netscape. Now that you have discovered the basic structure for a web page, we can move on.
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