A Markup tag is the fundamental characteristic of HTML(Hyper Text Mark-up Language). Every markup tag is a command placed between wickets or angle brackets—a left bracket (<) and a right bracket (>). Markup tags are not revealed by a web browser; they are invisible. In most cases, markup tags (containing commands) come in pairs, with text or a graphic image located between the beginning and ending tags.What is HTML?- HTML is a markup language for describing web documents (web pages).
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
A markup language is a set of markup tags
HTML documents are described by HTML tags
Each HTML tag describes different document content
Used as the very first tag, and the very last tag in an HTML document. Many web browsers do not require these tags if your file has the .html extension, but it is always a good idea to use them.
(<)HEAD(>) and (<)/HEAD(>)
Used to mark the header part of the HTML document. Within the header, certain tags are supported that aren't elsewhere. Usually the title is the only thing in the header.
(<)BODY(>) and (<)/BODY(>)
Surrounds the actual document information. All HTML files should have a BODY tag.
What goes in the head
(<)TITLE(>) and (<)/TITLE(>)
The text between this tag is displayed in the title bar of your web client. This is also the entry that gets listed in the bookmarks list, so choose a meaningful title, otherwise someone may get confused when they look for your page in their bookmark list a week later. The title text is also indexed by some of the search engines.
(<)META(>)
There are several forms of this tag. The more useful ones are used to provide hints for the search engines, so that they are more likely to lead people to your document who are interested in it. We will discuss it more in the second seminar.
(<)ISINDEX(>)
Used to inform a browser that the document is a searchable index, not really necessary for 99% of applications and is usually only used by automated HTML generators. Macintosh Internet Explorer Version 5 has a bug such that it will not be able to follow any links in the body of the page if this tag is in the head of the page.
(<)LINK(>)
Used to indicate a relationship between the document and other documents or objects. Not used often and I don't recommend it.
(<)BASE HREF="URL"(>)
If you put this in, the relative URL's in your document are treated relative to this address, rather than relative to the address of the current document. This is almost always a bad idea. More on this later when we discuss anchors.
Used to automate hypertext generation, not for use by mere mortals.
What goes in the body
The visible content of your page goes in the BODY section. The tags that you use in the BODY section include:
Separators
Anchors
Images
Headers
Lists
Character Formatting
Seperators
When browsers display Web pages, they take the HTML file and re-wrap it to fit the available display area. Tab characters are ignored, and all space characters and line breaks are treated as single spaces and the text wrapped to fit. Thus an ordinary text file cannot simply be placed into the BODY of an HTML page, because it will all run together into one enormous paragraph. This can make the translation between what you see while editing and what Netscape or Lynx puts on the screen a little confusing, but in the end turns out to be quite useful.
There are three main separators used to break up blocks of text in an HTML document:
(<)P(>)
This is the Paragraph Break tag. This will end your current line of text and put a nice space in between it and the next line of text. Use these liberally, as people like to rest their eyes when reading, computer text especially. Multiple
tags in a row do not increase the white space in the display.
(<)BR(>)
Line Break.
The break tag
is
used
to
break
up
lines
of
text. It does much the same thing in HTML that a "Hard Return" does in a word processor.
Multiple (<)BR(>) tags in a row do increase the white space in the display.
(<)HR(>)
Horizontal (or Hard) Rule. This will place a neat line across your page, from margin to margin, like so:
Horizontal rules are better choices for separating sections of your document than are wide short graphic images, because they will display correctly on any screen and with any browser.
Headers
this is H1
this is H2
this is H3
this is H4
this is H5
this is H6
Style Specifiers
Style is a widely used device which can be used inside tags like or
can be used in the heading
like a{ color:red } and now all your links are red