General Information about HTML commands
Last Up date:
2006 December 18
This Page started on: 2006 November 26 12:53:19
HTML imbeds commands into the text to inform the browser how you want
the text displayed. Because there are many options such as: color, size,
font, location on the screen, tables, lists, etc. There are a
relatively large number of these commands. Fortunately you have to only
learn a few for simple web pages like the one you are looking at
now.
The browser looks at your HTML file character by character and when it
finds a < it knows it has found a command. In HTML commands are
called "tags". All tags start with a < and end with a
>.
Most tags come in pairs: A starting tag and an ending tag to tell it
when to stop whatever the tag had done. For example in the preceding
paragraph you will notice I used Italics and Bold. This was accomplished
by putting <i> where I wanted Italics to start and </i>
where I wanted the Italics to stop. The ending tag is always a slash
followed by the first word in the starting tag. For bold it is the
same except a "b" is used in place of the "i". Tags are that simple,
although some tags have additional information in the starting
tag to give more detail. An example would be the Heading tags where
you may want the heading to be centered or at the left.
Just as you can speak English without learning every word in a
Dictionary, you can write HTML without knowing every tag or all the
detail of every tag. But just like in English if you do much writing you
need a dictionary you ultimately will need a HTML reference. I like
having a book, but there is a lot of information and HTML detail
available on the internet. But, for starts I will give you enough to
make web pages with: text, photos, and links to other web sites.
Some HTML musts
- Browsers ignore everything until it finds a <html> tag. So, most
of the time that is the first line in an HTML file; and the last line
is: </html>
- Every HTML page has two parts: A heading and a Body. Within the
heading there is a title.
So our HTML files will start with:
<html><head><title>
Yes, it is OK to put them on one line or each could be on separate
lines. In HTML line ends (CR-LF in Window & DOS) are treated as a
space. Further: several spaces are treated as a single space. This
gives us a lot of freedom in how we want our HTML files to look. Just
so you know: Paragraphs start with a <p> and should end
with </p>.
Following the title tag there are a few words for the browser to
display at the top of the screen. And of course there must be an ending
title tag, and then an ending </head> tag. Then a starting body tag.
Here is a simple page
using what we have talked about.
You can:
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