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Module 1: HTML Basics
HTML Tags: What are they and what do they mean?
HTML tags are basically commands written between angle brackets (<,>). This tells your Web browser how to display text and the overall page you created.
For example, every web page begins with <HTML> and ends with </HTML>. There are both beginning and ending tags. Beginning tags tells the browser when formatting begins, and ending tags tell the browser when formatting ends. Ending tags have a forward slash in front of the command as in the example:
This text is <strong>bold</strong>
In your Web browser, you would see this as:
This text is bold.
It doesn't matter how you type in the tags, they can be all capital letters or lowercase, or a combination of both. HOWEVER, xHTML only recognizes lowercase HTML tags. All HTML tags in this tutorial will be CAPITALIZED.
Attributes
HTML tags also have attributes. Several properties can be assigned to one base tag. For example,
<IMG src="pic.jpg" WIDTH="200" HEIGHT="150">
The tag in the example above is the IMG (image) tag. The properties of the IMG
tag are src, width, and height. These attributes tell the
browser to display the image "pic.jpg" and that the picture is 200 pixels
wide and 150 pixels high.
See a list of commonly used HTML 4.01 tags and their associated attributes »
Next: Basic Text Formatting Tags »
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