An HTML document begins with some text. This can be new text which you enter to create the document, or it can be an existing document which you are converting to HTML format. As you begin to prepare material for your WWW pages, you'll be surprised to find how much is already in files (such as your WordPerfect or Word documents) waiting to be transformed into Web pages.
HTML allows a simple text document to be displayed in a browser through the use of tags. Tags indicate to the browser where to begin and end sections of the document or special formatting. A tag is a bracketed command using the less than and greater than signs (< and >). The tag to begin boldface text, for example is <B> . To indicate the end of formatting, the same tag is used with a slash (/)after the first bracket. The end of bold would be </B> .
As an example, the formatting commands displayed earlier (boldface, italicized, or even both) would use these pairs of tags:
Notice that for
both, two pairs of tags are used. Tags can be used in a variety of combinations, but make sure you don't forget to end all the tags you started. The tags for centering text are:
By the way, don't worry about remembering all the tags given in these examples. They'll be listed again later in the guide.
Pairs of tags are used for different levels of headings ( <H2> , </H2> ), for formatting blocks of text ( <PRE> , </PRE> ), and for turning text into a link to other documents ( <A> , </A> ).
Back to Chapter Contents
Previous Section