BASIC INFO's (html elements)

◄HTML ELEMENTS►

Many HTML elements are designed for altering the semantic structure or meaning of a document. Some are block-level, but most are inline and can be included in the normal flow of text.

HTML element indicates structure in an HTML document and a way of hierarchically arranging content. More specifically, an HTML element is an SGML element that meets the requirements of one or more of the HTML DOCUMENT TYPE DEFINITIONS (DTDs). These elements have properties: both attributes and content, as specified (both allowable and required) according to the appropriate HTML DTD.

Syntactically HTML elements are constructed with:

• a start tag marking the beginning of an element
• any number of attributes (and their associated values)
• some amount of content (characters and other elements)
• an end tag (note: Empty elements should not have an end tag. It is optional for some others.)

Many HTML elements include attributes in their start tags, defining desired behavior or indicating additional element properties. The end tag is optional for many elements; in a minimal case, an empty element has no content and requires no end tag. There are a few elements that are not part of any official DTDs, yet are supported by some browsers and used by some web pages. Such elements may be ignored or displayed improperly on browsers not supporting them.

Informally, HTML elements are sometimes referred to as "tags" (an example of synecdoche), though many prefer the term tag strictly in reference to the semantic structures delimiting the start and end of an element.

this is it!!!

Introduction to HTML

--HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language

--An HTML file is a text file containing small markup tags

--The markup tags tell the Web browser how to display the page.

--An HTML file must have an htm or html file extension

--An HTML file can be created using a simple text editor.

HTM or HTML Extension?

When you save an HTML file, you can use either the .htm or the .html extension. We have used .htm in our examples. It might be a bad habit inherited from the past when some of the commonly used software only allowed three letters extensions.

Note on HTML Editors.

• You can easily edit files using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor like Frontpage, Claris Home Page or Adobe PageMill instead of writing your markup tags in a plain text file.

• But if you want to be skillful Web developer, we strongly recommend that you use a plain text editor to learn your primer HTML.

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 <>
• The surroundings characters are called angle brackets
• HTML tags normally come in pairs like and
• 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, means the same as

• The HTML element starts with a start tag:
• The content of the HTML element is: This text is bold
• The HTML element ends with an end tag:
• The purpose of the tag is to define an HTML element that should be displayed as bold.

Let's Start!!!

HTML ELEMENTS

HTML elements are the fundamentals of HTML. HTML documents are simply a text file made up of HTML elements. These elements are defined using HTML tags. HTML tags tell your browser which elements to 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.

Less than 5 minutes into this HTML tutorial and

I've already created my first homepage!

Explanation of the above code:

• The element tells the browser which version of HTML the document is using.

• The element can be thought of as a container that all other tags sit inside (except for the !DOCTYPE tag).

• The tag contains information that is not normally viewable within your browser (such as meta tags, JavaScript and CSS), although the