Do You Want to Try It?
If you are running Windows, start Notepad.
If you are on a Mac, start SimpleText.
In OSX start TextEdit and change the following preferences: Open the the "Format" menu and select "Plain text" instead of "Rich text". Then open the "Preferences" window under the "Text Edit" menu and select "Ignore rich Text commands in HTML files". Your HTML code will probably not work if you do not change the preferences above!
Type in the following text:
<html>
<head>
<title>Title of page</title>
</head>
<body>
This is my first homepage. <b>This text is bold</b>
</body>
</html>
Save the file as "mypage.htm".
Start your Internet browser. Select "Open" (or "Open Page") in the File menu of your browser. A dialog box will appear. Select "Browse" (or "Choose File") and locate the HTML file you just created - "mypage.htm" - select it and click "Open". Now you should see an address in the dialog box, for example "C:\MyDocuments\mypage.htm". Click OK, and the browser will display the page.
Example Explained
The first tag in your HTML document is <html>. This tag tells your browser that this is the start of an HTML document. The last tag in your document is </html>. This tag tells your browser that this is the end of the HTML document.
The text between the <head> tag and the </head> tag is header information. Header information is not displayed in the browser window.
The text between the <title> tags is the title of your document. The title is displayed in your browser''s caption.
The text between the <body> tags is the text that will be displayed in your browser.
The text between the <b> and </b> tags will be displayed in a bold font.
HTM or HTML Extension?
When you save an HTML file, you can use either the .htm or the .html extension. We have used .htm in our examples. It might be a bad habit inherited from the past when some of the commonly used software only allowed three letter extensions.
With newer software we think it will be perfectly safe to use .html.
Note on HTML Editors:
You can easily edit HTML files using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, instead of writing your markup tags in a plain text file.
However, if you want to be a skillful Web developer, we strongly recommend that you use a plain text editor to learn your primer HTML.
This is an HTML element:
<b>This text is bold</b>
The HTML element starts with a
start tag: <b>
The
content of the HTML element is: This text is bold
The HTML element ends with an
end tag: </b>
The purpose of the <b> tag is to define an HTML element that should be displayed as bold.
This is also an HTML element:
<body>
This is my first homepage. <b>This text is bold</b>
</body>
This HTML element starts with the start tag <body>, and ends with the end tag </body>.
The purpose of the <body> tag is to define the HTML element that contains the body of the HTML document.
Why do We Use Lowercase Tags?
We have just said that HTML tags are not case sensitive: <B> means the same as <b>. If you surf the Web, you will notice that plenty of web sites use uppercase HTML tags in their source code. We always use lowercase tags. Why?
If you want to follow the latest web standards, you should always use lowercase tags. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends lowercase tags in their HTML 4 recommendation, and XHTML (the next generation HTML) demands lowercase tags.
Tag Attributes
Tags can have attributes
. Attributes provide additional information to an HTML element.
The following tag defines an HTML table: <table>. With an added border attribute, you can tell the browser that the table should have no borders: <table border="0gt;
Attributes always come in name/value pairs like this: name="value".
Attributes are always specified in the start tag of an HTML element.
Attributes and attribute values are also case-insensitive. However, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends lowercase attributes/attribute values in their HTML 4 recommendation, and XHTML demands lowercase attributes/attribute values.
Always Quote Attribute Values
Attribute values should always be enclosed in quotes. Double style quotes are the most common, but single style quotes are also allowed.
In some rare situations, like when the attribute value itself contains quotes, it is necessary to use single quotes:
name=''John "ShotGun" Nelson''
