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About the Internet About Web Browsers Why Domain Names HTML vs XHTML Making Webpage Files Naming Webpage Files About HTML Tags Basic HTML Page DTDs and Doctype Tags Spaces and New Lines Special Characters Bold, Italics, More Writing Headlines Adding Links Making Lists Comments in HTML How to Add Images Sources of Images Image File Formats Optimizing Images Color in HTML & CSS "Web-safe" Color Chart Making Tables Formatting with Tables Making Forms Using Imagemaps Using Frames Meta Tags Intro to CSS Ways to include CSS Some Useful CSS CSS Hover for Links Promoting Your Site How-To's Homepage Links |
Meet the TagsA text document is converted to an HTML or XHTML document by adding tags that tell the browser what each part of the document is so that the browser can do the right thing with it. Tags show the browser what's a link, what's a headline, what's a picture, and so on. Tags are enclosed in < & > brackets so that the browser will know that they are tags and not just part of the document's text. Most HTML tags come in pairs, with the form <tag> for the beginning of the region affected by the tag and </tag> for the closing of the region affected by the tag. Instead of "tag", real HTML/XHTML tags have a word or other short mnemonic explaining what they are for. Some examples are: body, div, h1, img. XHTML requires all tags to be closed. In HTML most tags needed closing, but there were some that didn't. When the tag is a stand-alone tag that doesn't enclose text, such as the <br /> tag, XHTML lets you close it by putting " /" right before the >, so <br /> is a well-made closed tag. In XHTML all tags must be written in lower case. In HTML it didn't matter whether you used capital or small letters in your tags. Some tags can be "nested" inside of other tags. Think of this as putting one container inside another. The inside tag must be closed before the outer one is. |
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