HTML Tutorial
    Introduction
    What is HTML?
    HTML Basics
    Coding Basics
    Text
    Links
    Images
    Layout Basics
    Tables
    Meta Tags
    Color Codes
    Symbol Codes
JavaScripts
Javascript Tutorial
    HTML is a language that defines the look of text and images and other objects. It does this through the use of what are called tags. There are many tags in HTML each defining a different property. Some set the position of objects while others set the look of fonts or where a link should point to. In an HTML document all text appears in the browser window except that contained in < > which is reserved for tags. This means that anything between < > will not appear as text even if it is not actually a tag. For example, <protoplasm> would be completely ignored.

    I've been saying a lot about these 'magical' tags that do everything in HTML. So what exactly are these tags, what do they look like, and how do I use them? Well a tag consists of two parts. An opening tag and a closing tag. The closing tag is the same as the open except it starts with a '/'. As an example I will use the very common anchor tag. The opening and closing tag look like this: <A> </A>. The text between the two tags will get formated according to the tags specification. In my anchor example the text will be formated as an anchor which is more commonly called a hyperlink.

    Now I'm sure that you are all familiar with hyperlinks. So you are probably wondering how this tag, which appears to only be the letter 'A', links a user to another webpage. Well that's were another part of the tag, which I have not yet mentioned, comes in. This other part is called the tags attributes. Basically attributes are options each tag has. These attributes are set in the opening tag only. So to go back to the anchor example again, we use the href attribute to specify the address of the link. It looks like this: <A HREF = "http://geocities.datacellar.net"> This text will be the link</A>.

    So now your probably thinking how easy this sounds and want to get started. Well there are a few more important points that you need to know first. In order for a browser to correctly see your document as an HTML file it needs to end in '.htm' or '.html'. Also within your document you need to put all of your tags and data within the <HTML> </HTML> tags. This defines your document as an HTML file. Further more within an HTML document there are two main areas. These would be the header and the body. Within the header tag goes your title tags, which sets the text on the title bar, and the meta tags, which I will talk about later. The main content of your webpage goes between the body tags. The following is the basic structure you need in all HTML files.

<HTML>
  <HEAD>
    <TITLE></TITLE>
  </HEAD>
  <BODY>
  </BODY>
</HTML>

    The body tag has several important attributes associated with it. bgcolor sets the background color; background sets the background image; alink sets the color of active hyperlinks; link sets the color of hyperlinks; vlink sets the color of visited hyperlinks; text sets the default color of the text.

Written by Protoplasm

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