HTML stands for (H)yper(T)ext (M)arkup (L)anguage. It has certain tags
and attributes defined, and is geared towards document display over the
World Wide Web. HTML documents can be viewed in browsers such as
Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. On this page, we will
introduce the notion of tags and attributes.
Tags
Tags are elements of the HTML document used to specify how the document should
be displayed by the browser. In HTML, each tag has its own specific meaning,
which is (in general) common across all different browsers. In fact, you may
think of this tutorial as an introduction to the tags that are commonly used
in writing HTML.
Attributes
Attributes are associated with each tag to further define the tags.
The general syntax is as follows:
<tag attribute 1 = "value" attribute 2 = "value" ... >
A couple of other notes before we dive into the tutorial:
- HTML tag codes are case-insensitive.
- Many browsers will ignore badly-formed HTML documents. In other words, it is
often okay to have a tag without the corresponding closing tag.