HyperText Markup Language

This document assumes that you understand the basics of creating a webpage, but wish to learn about some of the commonly used elements of HTML, the language used to write webpages. It does not teach you how to upload a page to your server, or anything along those lines, but it will show you how you can actually construct a page, and put in things such as tables and frames, along with some advice. Also note that this document will ONLY feature things supported by HTML 3.2 (the current DTD version), or BOTH Netscape and IE.

Index

Document structure
Formatting text

Document structure

An html document is made up of two basic sections, a 'head' and a 'body'. The head contains things such as comments (which are not actually seen by a surfer), and the title of the document. The body contains the real 'meat' of the document.

All HTML documents should be opened with the <HTML> tag, and both the head and body should be input before the closing </HTML> tag. The header of a document is denoted by <HEAD> and </HEAD> and the body by <BODY> to </BODY>.

This means that every HTML document should conform to this very basic layout:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
The document header goes here.
</HEAD>
<BODY>
The document body goes here.
</BODY>
<HTML>

With that out of the way, there are a few things any potential HTML author should know. The first thing is that these tags are used to alter and arrange normal text - any normal text which you type in will appear pretty much as you put it in, except where it is changed by tags (try putting the above sample into an html document and looking at it through your browser to see what I mean). The main exception to this rule is that using your enter or return key will not put a line-break into text in HTML. For that, you must use the <BR> tag.

Most tags (the line-break is one of the exceptions) are opened, and then later closed, affecting only text which is 'trapped' between them, for instance:

<BODY>
This is the document body.
</BODY>

Denotes that 'This is the document body.' is the body of the document, because it is trapped between the 'open body' and 'close body' tag. All opening tags are simply the name of the tag in triangular brackes, and the closing tags are identical, but with the name preceded by a forwards slash (/).

Now you can lay out an HTML document, and put basic text into it, along with line-breaks. This is all you need to create a very simple webpage! The next section will deal with basic formatting elements, such as bold and italic text.