HTML: an Introduction - Part II

We're going to explain the meanings of   those basic tags included on previous Web page: template.html. Later, we'll introduce more other tags and their uses.

<HTML> </HTML>
This pair of tags normally begins and ends any HTML document.

<HEAD> </HEAD>
The header tags contain header information, for example comments or notes that you don't want to display with the rest of the page. The most important item to place in the header tag is the <TITLE> pair.

<TITLE> </TITLE>
These important tags contain what browsers will interpret as the "official" title of the page. When you bookmark the Web page, the document's title is what appears on your list. So you should choose the good title for your Web page because it will convey the description of your Web page.

<BODY> </BODY>
The body tags enclose all the rest of the HTML tags. There are some attributes that can go in the <BODY> tag. For example, a typical <body> tag would look like:
<body  bgcolor = "#FFFFFF"   background = "bground.gif"           
  text = "#000000"  link = "#0000FF" vlink = "#0000FF">

  • The bgcolor attribute describes the back ground color of your Web page. In the above example, the background color is white(color code #FFFFFF).
  • The background attribute points to the image "bground.gif"  used for the background of the Web page.
  • The text attribute defines the defaut color of the text in your Web page. In this example, the color code "#000000" sets the default color of the text, and it is black text.
  • The link attribute will dictate the color of the links on your Web page. In this example, it will show the links on your Web page, if any, in blue color.
  • The vlink attribute will set the color of the visited links, if any, in blue color.
  • You can subsitute the value of "blue"   "black", etc. in place of the color codes.

For a list of standard colors and their values, click here

<H1> </H1>

  • The heading tags from <H1></H1>  to <H6> </H6> encloses the headlines and subheadlines.
  • Heading 1 <H1> </H1>is the largest and should serve as the main heading. Heading 6 <H6> </H6> is the smallest one.
  • Attribute "align" and its values "center" can go in <H1> tag to center the text. For example: <H1 align = "center">

<P> </P>
These paragraph tags will break a long document into several smaller paragraphs for readable reasons. There are some attributes and their values  that can go along with these tags. For example, a paragraph tag could look like this one: <P align = "left">. The attribute "align" and its value "left" will format the paragraph left-sided by default. Other values are "center" and "right".