The Empty Page
HTML is written as matched pairs of tags e.g.
<html> to begin HTML and </html> to end it. All tags consist
of less than sign < followed by the tag name and finally a greater
than sign >. The addition of the backslash / indicates a closing
tag. Any tag which opens inside any other pair must be closed
inside the same pair. The tags are nested inside each other but must
not cross.
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Examples:
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Right
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Wrong
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<head>
<title> Text of title </title>
</head>
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<head>
<title> Text of title </head>
</title>
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The tags do not need to be in lower case, they could
be in upper case. However you should use lower case as soon upper case will
not functuion as you might expect. Note my layout. as you already learned the
layout of the webpage is controlled by the html tags, so my layout makes no
difference. Every carriage return I entered is ignored by the web browser (IE
or Netscape) as are all the spaces outside of the tags other than one space
between each word. The tags themselves, however, must be complete and only contain
allowed spaces (otherwise the web browser will not recognise them and think
they are text!).
To create an empty page to contain the rest
of your document you will need to type the following:
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<html>
<head>
<title>Your title
goes here</title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
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Replace Your title goes here
with a title for your page.
Now, let's examine what this all means:
- All HTML documents need to begin <html> and end </html>.
This tells the web browser what type of document it is dealing
with. Ah, I hear you say "but what else do you expect on
the web?". A web browser can deal with many other types
of documents, such as text documents - so it needs you to tell
it.
- A HTML document is made up of two parts a head and a body.
- The head part does not display in the browser window - it
contains information which is useful for search engines, for
example.
- The title displays in the blue window title bar at the very
top of the window.
- The part of the document you want the user to see goes into
the body section.
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