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Chapter 1 Preview This chapter will cover the basic structure of an HTML page, and all the basic tags. All the tags that are covered in this chapter should be used, even though they aren't absolutely necessary. But, if they aren't used, the page could be rendered strangely. Lesson To make an HTML document, there is a certain structure you must adhere to. Though browsers are tending to be more and more lenient about this structure, it is best to get in good habits, so that if browsers become more strict, your pages will be ok. The basic structure of an HTML document is as follows. <html> <head> <title>Document Title</title> </head> <body> Page Content </body> </html>Now, some explanation of these elements is in order. The <html> element is the root element in the document. It is the container for the whole document. Anything outside the <html> and </html> tags should be ignored. Then, there is the <head> tag. This tag is the container for any information that the browser should have, but not display it in the document. This includes the title for the window, keywords and descriptions for search engines, and information about the author. All there is in this example is the <title> tag. Then, there is the <body> tag which is used to denote that the remaining information until the </body> tag should be rendered inside the window as the webpage's content. This example would render the words 'Page Content' inside the browser window, and the words would be in the default font and size. Then, there is the </html> tag which ends the HTML document, since the browser won't read any information after that tag. You are probably wondering why there are tags that have plain names, and some that start with a slash. The tags that end with a slash are used to denote the end of the tags with the plain names. If there were no end tag, the element would continue to exist beyond it's normal boundaries, so the page would not be rendered correctly. Some elements, such as the <img> (image) tag, are standalone, so they don't need an end tag, but we will get to that in later chapters. These tags don't provide any content (except for the title), but they are all necessary. The next chapter will deal with tags that provide more content and formatting of that content.
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