HTML Basics

Contents

What is HTML?
Your first HTML document
Text formatting tags
Color and Style
Adding Images
Creating links
Tables
Forms
Lists
Special Characters
Putting your page on the Internet
HTML Links

Basic Layout

A valid HTML document begins with an html tag (<html>) and ends with an ending html tag (</html>). That's it!. A document containing those 2 symbols, in that order, is displayable in any browser. Of course, some browsers will display your document without these tags, but it is not considered a valid HTML document. 

Within the html tags is the head section then the body section. Here's the basic layout...

<html>
<head>header content</head>
<body>body content</body>
</html>

The head section of the document contains information describing the document and information used by the document, such as the <title> tag. Other tags that may be found here are <style>, <script>, and <meta> tags.

The body section as the name suggests, contains the document body...everything that you want shown in the browser.

Note that a well-formed html document contains proper nesting of tags. For instance the following is valid...

<head><title>My Title</title></head>

And this is not valid...

<head><title>My Title</head></title>

Why? Because the title tag is nested inside the head tag. Therefore the title tag must end before the head tag. Not all browsers are strict about this but it's best to have a well-formed document for it to be displayed as expected. This is particularly important when using table tags.

Now you get to create your own html document.

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