HTML elements
HTML elementsare the
fundamentals of HTML.
HTML documents are simply
a text file made up of HTML
elements. These elements
are defined usingHTML tags.
HTML tags tell your browser
whichelementsto present
and how to present them.
Where the element appears
is determined by the order
in which the tags
appear.HTML consists of
almost 100 tags. Don't let
that put you off though -
you will probably find that
most of the time, you only
use a handful of tags on
your web pages. Having
said that, I highly
recommend learning all
HTML tags eventually - but
we'll get to that later.OK,
lets look more closely at the
example that we created in
the previous lesson.
<!
DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//
W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/
html4/
strict.dtd"><html><head><title>HTML
Tutorial Example</title></
head><body><p>Less than 5
minutes into this HTML
tutorial andI've already
created my first homepage!
</p></body></
html>Explanation of the
above code: *.The<!
DOCTYPE... >element tells
the browser which version
of HTML the document is
using. *.The<html>element
can be thought of as a
container that all other tags
sit inside (except for the !
DOCTYPE tag).
*.The<head>tag contains
information that is not
normally viewable within
your browser (such as meta
tags, JavaScript and CSS),
although the<title>tag is an
exception to this. The
content of the<title>tag is
displayed in the browser's
title bar (right at the very
top of the browser).
*.The<body>tag is the main
area for your content. This
is where most of your code
(and viewable elements)
will go. *.The<p>tag
declares a paragraph. This
contains the body
text.Closing your tagsAs
mentioned in a previous
lesson, you'll notice that all
of these tags have opening
and closing tags, and that
the content of the tag is
placed in between them.
There are a few exceptions
to this rule.You'll also notice
that the closing tag is
slightly different to the
opening tag - the closing
tag contains a forward
slash (/) after the<.
This
tells the browser that this
tag closes the previous
one.UPPERCASE or
lowercase?Although most
browsers will display your
page regardless of the case
you use, you should always
code in lowercase. This
helps keep your code XML
compliant (but that's
another topic).Therefore...
Good: <head> Bad: <HEAD>In
the next lesson, we learn
about some of the more
common formatting tags.
