HTML Class - Fall 2002
HTML Elements
HTML documents are text files made up of HTML elements.
HTML elements are defined using HTML tags.
HTML Tags
- HTML tags are used to mark-up HTML elements
- HTML tags are surrounded by the two characters < and >
- The surrounding characters are called angle brackets
- HTML tags normally come in pairs like <b> and </b>
- The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the
end tag
- The text between the start and end tags is the element content
- HTML tags are not case sensitive, <b> means the same as
<B>
HTML Elements
This is an HTML element:
The HTML element starts with a start tag: <b> The
content of the HTML element is: This text is bold The HTML element
ends with an end tag: </b>
The purpose of the <b> tag is to define an HTML element that should be
displayed as bold.
This is also an HTML element:
<body>
This is my first homepage.
<b>This text is bold</b>
</body> |
This HTML element starts with the start tag <body>, and ends with the
end tag </body>.
The purpose of the <body> tag is to define the HTML element that
contains the body of the HTML document.
Tag AttributesTags can have attributes. Attributes can provide
additional information about the HTML elements on your page.
This tag defines the body element of your HTML page: <body>. With an
added bgcolor attribute, you can tell the browser that the background color of
your page should be red, like this: <body bgcolor="red">.
This tag defines an HTML table: <table>. With an added border
attribute, you can tell the browser that the table should have no borders:
<table border="0">
Attributes always come in name/value pairs like this: name="value".
Attributes are always added to the start tag of an HTML element (never to the end tag).
Quote Styles, "red" or 'red'?
Attribute values should always be enclosed in quotes. Double style quotes are
the most common, but single style quotes are also allowed.
In some rare situations, like when the attribute value itself contains
quotes, it is necessary to use single quotes:
name='John "ShotGun" Nelson'
Use Lowercase Tags?
HTML tags are not case sensitive: <B> means the
same as <b>. When you surf the Web, you will notice that most tutorials
use uppercase HTML tags in their examples.
However, if you want to prepare yourself for the next generations of HTML you should
start using lowercase tags. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends
lowercase tags in their HTML 4 recommendation, and XHTML (the next generation
HTML) demands lowercase tags.
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