The Guide - Understanding HTML Tags

Introduction to HTML

	Introduction
	Tools Required - An ASCII text editor.
	Understanding HTML Tags
	More Tags some essential tags.
	BODY Tag revisited
	Conclusion
	Some Important links: List of links which will help you get started

Related Links

1.	World Wide Web Consortium - Organization which defines HTML Standards
2.	Validation Service - Validate your HTML codet

Understanding HTML Tags

Tags are the "markups" in Hypertext Markup Language. They are the embedded directives interpreted by the browser but not displayed. Most of these tags come in pairs. The first member of the pair is called a start tag.

Example : <HEAD>

It indicates the beginning of the area that the tag-pair applies to. The second member of the pair, the stop tag or the end tag always has a slash (/) as its first character.

Example : </HEAD>

It indicates the end of the area that the tag pair applies to.Note that HTML tags are always enclosed within angular-
brackets (<>).

Some tags are Universal. You will find these in almost every HTML Document.

and indicate the beginning and the end of an HTML document
<HEAD> and </HEAD> identify the properties of the entire HTML document
<TITLE> and </TITLE> are at the beginning and end of the title that appears in the browser's title bar. They appear between the two members of the HEAD tag-pair.
<BODY> and </BODY> form the boundaries of the document's
main body

To make your HTML code comprehensible to others, you can
enclose comments between angularbrackets. The left angle-
bracket is followed by !-- and the right angle bracket
is preceded by --.

Example : 

The browser ignores the comments. A raw HTML document with
all the tags embedded quickly becomes unreadable. The author
strongly advocates the use of comments to guide a composing
eye.

A sample HTML document is given below.

This is my first HTML document. I am reading the tutorial posted on VSNL Website

This document can be created using any text-editor and saved
as an ASCII file with .htm extension on the disk. Launch your
browser and give the full path name of your .htm file as the
address. Your browser displays the document.

Three more tag pairs are given below.

* and indcate bold typeface for the enclosed text
* <BIG> and </BIG> make font of the enclosed text larger
* <CENTER> and </CENTER> center the enclosed line on the page

These pairs are introduced in the earlier document as shown
below.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My First HTML Page </TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>


<BIG>
<CENTER>

This is my first HTML document.
 
I am reading the tutorial posted on VSNL Website
</CENTER>
</BIG>

</BODY>
</HTML>

Store this as another document and view it with your browser. To see what this page looks like:
Click Here

The tag inserts a new line. It does not have a pair. Two
new lines are introduced between the lines in the
above example. Any number of new lines can be introduced
using this tag.

More Tags