Chapter 5. Introduction to HTML: Basic Tags, Tables, and Frames
Chapter Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will be able to understand:
Creating a Web site is next to impossible without some use of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML is the text markup language currently used on the World Wide Web to indicate the structure and formatting of most Web pages. Web developers use this language to tell Web browsers how to display Web pages. HTML is a relatively simple Web development language to learn and you can quickly and easily build a very professional-looking set of Web pages immediately by implementing a few common HTML tags.
An HTML document is a plain text file (often referred to as an ASCII file) with codes (referred to as tags) inserted in the text to define elements in the document. These tags generally have two parts, a beginning tag (sometimes called an on-code) and an ending tag (sometimes called an off-code), that contain the text to be defined. A few tags don’t require ending tags. These tags will be noted as they are covered. You can represent a tag in the following manner, where the ellipsis (...) denotes the text you want to define:
<TAGNAME> ... </TAGNAME>
For example, the following HTML code represents a line of text to be bolded within an HTML document:
<B>This line of text will be displayed by your Web browser in boldface.</B>
In this chapter you learn to create a few simple Web pages using common HTML tags. Later in this chapter you are given an opportunity to further refine the look and feel of your pages by adding basic HTML tables and basic HTML frames. You learn that tables and frames can be used to logically separate parts of a Web application, as well as to provide a cleaner presentation due to their ability to assist in areas such as aligning the various elements of your Web pages.