Lesson 3C HTML Tags

<HTML> </HTML>

This is placed at the beginning and the end of a document. It
tells the browser that this file is a document containing
hypertext markup language.

<HEAD> </HEAD>

This tag doesn't have any attributes, but is a container for other
tags like the <TITLE> and the <META> tag. It provides the browser,
search engines, or visitors (that know where to look) with
information about the document. It appears after the <HTML> tag
but before the <BODY> tag.

<TITLE> </TITLE>

This tag defines the title of the web page. It should be placed
between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

<META>

This is a stand alone tag. The meta tag is used to provide
information such as keywords, descriptions, or directions for
search engines. It should be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD>
tags. You can find more information about the meta tag
HERE.

<BODY> </BODY>

This tag defines the beginning and the ending of the HTML document
body. It appears after the </HEAD> tag. It holds the contents of
the web page. You can use this tag to define the color of the
background or if you want to use an image in the background. You
can define the color of regular text, links, active links, and
visited links. An example of this would be
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFCC" BACKGROUND="swirl.jpg" TEXT="#000000"
LINK="#6666CC" VLINK="#FF6699" ALINK="#000099">

To get a full list of attributes I would
suggest visiting

the HTML Compendium or

the World Wide Web Consortium.

 

This tag defines the look of the text contained between the
beginning and ending tags. You can define the color, the size, and
the face (the name) of the font. If you don't define this, the
browser will use the browser default settings. The text that
appears after the tag will not change until the
closing/ending tag or until it encounters another 
tag. So, it's possible to write a FONT tag as follows:

 to produce
THIS and then add this to produce THIS.

As you can see the face of the font
remained "arial" and the size remained "2," just the color changed
from red to blue.

<IMG>

The image tag is a stand alone tag that tells the browser the name
of the image file that is to be displayed. It always has the
attribute "SRC" with the value being the path to the image file.
Another attribute is "BORDER" If an image is used as a link, a
border will appear around the image by default. If you don't want
a border around the image the BORDER value should be zero. An
example of the IMG tag is as follows: <IMG SRC="sunflower.jpg"
BORDER="0">

<A> </A>

The Anchor tag is used for creating links. The link can be within
the HTML document or to other pages, websites, images, or even
email. The HREF attribute has a value that specifies the URL. The
text that appears between the beginning and ending/closing Anchor
tag will appear on the web page with an underline. The color of
the the text link can be defined in the <BODY> tag. If you don't
define the color of the link, the browser will use the default
settings (usually the default color for a link is blue).

If an <IMG> tag is placed between the beginning and ending/closing
Anchor tag, the image that appears on the page will have a border
around it. If you don't want a border around the image you need to
define that attribute (and value) within the <IMG> tag (as
explained above). An example of an anchor tag would look like
this:

<A HREF="http://www.netpond.com">Netpond Adult Webmaster
Resources</A>

and produce this

Netpond Adult Webmaster Resources

<CENTER> </CENTER>

This tag is extremely helpful. It helps to align objects (text and
images) in the document (web page). The default setting for
alignment is to the left side of the browser window. By placing
text or images between the beginning and ending/closing <CENTER>
tag, they will be

horizontally centered on the page.

The Paragraph tag defines the beginning of what else... a
paragraph. It can also be used to align or place text on the left
side, center, or right side of the browser window. Whatever text
appears between the beginning and ending/closing tags will be
affected by that tag. This tag can stand alone, that is you can
use just the beginning tag, but to avoid confusion and debugging
problems, it's usually a good idea to use the ending/closing as
well. An example of using this tag to align text to the right side
of the window would look like this:

and would produce this!

That concludes the most basic tags. To learn more about HTML I
would suggest reading the following books:

Instant HTML Programmer's Reference Html

HTML 4.0 Edition

by Alex Homer, Chris Ullman, and Steve Wright

Wrox Press Inc; ISBN: 1861001568

HTML: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

by Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy

O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 1565924924

Web Design in a Nutshell : A Desktop Quick Reference

by Jennifer Niederst, Richard Koman

O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 1565925157

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