Beginners guide to HTML: introducing the basic HTML tags.

Introduction to HTML

Part 2 of 4

Below are the tags every HTML document must have. You can type the HTML tags in either lower case or capital letters, but there are a few commands that cause problems in certain browsers in upper case.

Other languages such as XML require that tags be in lower case, and some people are calling for the same requirement for HTML. Additionly, many web servers require that directory names be in lower case. I strongly recommend you to code in lower case at all times, or one day you may well find you have to rebuild your pages because you didn't use lower case. Better to develop a good habit now than to unlearn a bad habit later.

These tags are the bare necessities:

<html>
<head>
<title>...</title>
</head>
<body>

Content Area

</body>
</html>

It's not as confusing as it looks. I've shown the HTML commands in bold, red text, but the commands themselves do not show up on a web page. They are in the "source code," which is simply the text file that contains the HTML code and the content you want displayed on the page people see.

The browser interprets the HTML commands in the source code and displays your content according to those HTML instructions (commands). If the above code were a real web page, the words "Content Area" is the only thing that would show up in a browser window.

Here's a brief explanation of each tag...

<html>
Identifies the file type for the browser, in this case, a web page.

<head>
Acts as a sort of super-container for other HTML commands, such as the page title and meta data.

<title>
The title is the name of the page. The title shows up in the title bar at the top of your browser, as the text for bookmarks unless it's changed, and in some search engines as the link text. If you look at the title bar at the top of your browser, it should say Beginners guide to HTML: Introducing the basic HTML tags., since that's the title I gave the page you are currently reading.

</title>
Closes the title. The forward slash ( / ) in front of the html command means the command is now canceled.

</head>
Closes the head section.

<body>
The body is where you place the actual content of the web page. This is the stuff people see, except for the actual HTML commands within the body section.

</body>
Closes the body section

</html>
Closes the html command, end of page.

On the next page we'll introduce something new, tag attributes.

Back | Next | HTML Tutorials Index

Web Design

Site Information

More Boogie Jack Sites

Introduction to HTML