ABSTRACT
HTML: THE BASICS AND WHY YOU NEED THEM Hypertext markup language (HTML) is the predominant authoring language for the creation of web pages. HTML defines the structure and layout of a web document by using a variety of tags and attributes to denote formatting of certain text as headings, paragraphs, and lists. HTML is written in the form of tags bracketed by the greater than and less than symbols, such as < tag >. Most tags come in pairs, the opening tag is listed as <tag>, and the closing tag is </tag>, which denotes the end of the previous command. For example, if you wanted to italicize a word in a sentence, you would precede the word with the tag for italics <i> and follow the word with the end tag </i>. Failure to include the end tag would result in everything from that point forward being presented in italics. A web visitor’s browser examines the HTML for instructions on how to display the graphics, text, and other multimedia components. Tutorials can be found at
All HTML documents start with the command <html>. This lets the browser know to read and interpret the commands as HTML. The last tag on the web page should be the end tag </html>. This tag tells your browser that this is the
end of the HTML document. Beneath the <html> tag at the top of the page, you will find header information between the <head> and </head> tags. This information is not displayed on the page. The head element contains information about the document, some of which helps search engines catalog and describe the site. Head tags include those shown in Table 6.1.
