HTML Tags 3
Page-level HTML Tags <html> <body> <head> <title>
Although browsers do not enforce this, HTML documents are supposed to begin and end with <html> and </html> tags. I had to tell you that or the W3C henchmen would beat me up. Of much more interest is that fact that...
Every web page has two sections, a head and a body!
The head part is at the top of the page and contains information about the entire page (sometimes called 'Meta Data'). The body part is the rest of the page and contains the part that is actually seen by the user. This is important because you can put all kinds of cool stuff in the head section such as a <title> tag. Titles do not show up on the web page but they are usually displayed in the title bar of the web browser.
For example, here's a really simple web page with both sections (I've drawn a dashed box around each section so you can see it easier):
<html><head> <title> This is my first complete web page! </title> </head><body> <h1> Hello World </h1> <p> This is a really simple web page! </p> </body></html>
And here is how that code would look in Internet Explorer. Notice how the <title> information is displayed in the browser's title bar?
The <title> information is also used by various web search engines such as Google... and we'll cover how to write pages to rank high in Google later in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) section.
We'll learn more stuff you can do with the head section later but for now I want to take advantage of your knowledge of the <body> tag to explain an important aspect of html tags: tag attributes.
HTML Tag Attributes
Attributes are extra properties added to the opening tag such as to define a color. For example, we can us the bgcolor attribute of the <body> tag to change the background color of our entire web-page. It would look like this:
Go ahead and try some different bgcolor attribute colors like ""yellow", "grey", and "blue" (just please don't actually use these colors as your real webpage backgrounds!!
HTML Tag Attributes are very important and you'll end up using them constantly. For now, I want to keep things simple so I will introduce only a few attributes.
Let's go ahead and create a project folder and create your first real web page!
