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HTML Guide, HTML basic structure

See also: Web site optimization for speed

Web site optimization for errors

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.



The HTML files are usual text files that contain some tags. One web site may contain one or more HTML (web) pages. They are located on web server connected to Internet. An HTML file may have either htm either html extension. It often depends on the software used to generate the HTML file. As it is an ordinary ASCII text file, the HTML can be created or edited using any text editor, like Notepad for example. However, there are also specialized programs that are dedicated for web design – html editors. Some of these editors may have WYSIWYG feature – What You See Is What You Get. These editors allow you to work with the html code directly or via the page layout workspace automatically generating the html code while you change the page layout.

Regardless whether you use WYSIWYG html editor, it is always highly recommendable to know at least the basis of the HTML syntax.

HTML Page structure

HTML HEAD open tagAn HTML page contains two main sections – HEAD and BODY and always starts with <html> tag and ends with </html> closing tag.

The web page head and body sections are also closed between their specific opening and closing tags - <head> </head> and <body> </body>.  The information placed in the head section will not be displayed in the browser window. It will display the content located in the body section only.

A simplified HTML page example:

<html>

            <head>

                       Place header information here. This is not visible in the browser window.

            </head>

            <body>

                       Place page content here

            </body>

</html>

The HTML tags are surrounded by angle brackets and always come in pairs, like

<body>

Some content …

</body>

The information closed between the tags is called HTML element. The page body is an html element in this regard. HTML head closing tag

Tags can have attributes. The attributes provide additional information about the element closed between the corresponding tags. For example to add color background to web page the attribute bgcolor can be used. Then BODY tag change to <body bgcolor="#ffdab9"> where bgcolor is the name of the attribute and #ffdab9 is its value. To define table that do not have border and has blue background use
<table width="100%" border="0" bgcolor="blue" >

The most often used HTML tags:

<p> </p> - separates paragraph of text

<br> - ends current line and starts the following text on new line, but within the current paragraph. This tag is single - it has no closing tag.

<h1> to <h6> define text headings. <h1> defines the largest heading.

<hr> defines a horizontal line.

Pay attention that not all tags are handled one and the same way in the different browsers. For example <hr color="Green"> in some browsers will display horizontal line with green color, but in other the color will depend on the system colors used.

Next: HTML Special characters handling


12 Note Website management