The Basics of HTML

This article is the first in a series of articles teaching beginners how to author in HTML. This article will introduce you to the basic concept behind the construction of 'tags'.

HTML code is all basically the same. It revolves around a set of 'Tags'. These tags surround the text, or content, that you want in your page. The content is 'nested' within the tags. A tag does something to the data, depending on which tag it is, and what attributes the tag has. For example the tags surrounding some text might make it into a simple paragraph aligned to the right. The code for this would be:

If you dissect the above code example you will find that it takes the following form:

• Opening Tag
• Attributes with values
• Content
• Closing Tag

Notice that the closing tag is the same as the first opening tag without the attributes but preceded by a forward slash. This is the same for almost all the HTML tags you will come across so get used to the idea now.

The next thing to know about HTML is that you can nest tags within other tags. This enables you to give a general format, or structure, to a piece of content and then nest a tag around some more within that to specifically format a bit. For example you may want to make part of a paragraph bold. This is easily done using the <B> tag:

If you look at the above code example you will see that the word 'paragraph' is surrounded by the <B> tags. This makes it bold. I have made the example bold just to show you the effect.

You should by now have the basic idea of the HTML system, please look carefully at the code examples given as it will be useful to remember for the next couple of HTML articles.

HTML TUTORIAL: Next Article - A Basic HTML Page; Previous Article - An Introduction to Hypertext and HTML