Learning HTML 3.2 3.2: Structure of HTML

Creating HTML documents is not rocket science.  If you can create a word processing document you can create Web pages.  You'll write text, and then you'll insert tags at certain places within your text.  These tags instruct the web browser how to display the text that you've written, just like you bold text or apply paragraph styles in a word processor.

Most tags use the following format:

<tag>some text written here</tag>

There's a start tag, and an end tag.  The start tag just looks like <tag>, but the end tag, </tag>, has a slash in it.  The text within the two tags will be affected by the function of the tag.

Just for an example, let's take the <B> tag and analyze what it does.  Here's a line of HTML:

<B>HTML is easy, isn't it?</B>

This will cause the text within <B> and </B> to be written in bold, like this:

HTML is easy, isn't it?

And it is, isn't it?  HTML is not difficult to learn.  You use some tags to format the text the way you would like it displayed, using either Logical Formatting (e.g., Citation, Emphasis, Strong Emphasis, etc.) or Physical Formatting tags (e.g., Bold, Italic, Typewriter, etc.), and then format the paragraphs using Block Formatting tags (e.g., Address, Blockquote, Heading, etc.).

There are some other tags you won't see that tell the browser what type of document and what version of HTML it is in addition to specifying the sections of the document, like the Head where other programming and server codes are kept, and the Body which is the text itself.  If you use an HTML Editor it will most likely add these codes for you to the document, usually called a default template.  You can modify this template to change the defaults provided by the HTML Editor and some editors even have a macro language to automate some editing tasks.  In the next section I'll show you what this default template looks like for several versions of HTML and explain it's parts.