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19: Basic HTML Structure

Many classes will have you make a webpage for one project or another. HTML is a very easy language to learn. This article is NOT a substitute for any books, websites, or guides a teacher may give you. This is only a reference to the basic structure of an HTML document and what each part of that structure does.

What is HTML?


HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is not a programming language; it is a markup language. A markup language is just documentation on how the text should look.

Basic Structure


All HTML documents need to contain the following tags in this order:

<html>
<head><title></title></head>
<body></body>
</html>

Note the format of the document. All of the HTML tags have an open and close tag. <html> is an open tag, </html> is a close tag. All html documents must have an <html> open tag as the first line. This tells the web browser that this is, in fact, an html document.

The <head> tag is for stuff that doesn’t need to appear in the “main screen”. You can put links to css documents, javascript, or even javascript code in the head tags. Note that the <title></title> tag is in the <head> tag. This sets the title of the window.

Anything you want displayed on the screen should be placed within the <body> and </body> tags.

Finally you must close your document with a </html> tag.

For more information on how to use HTML please visit TC709 or www.webmonkey.com for some great tutorials.

This article was last edited on Jun-08-2006 9:07 am
This article can be referenced by its article number: 19 or by any of the following keywords: creating web pages