Formatting Documents using HTML
All Web documents are written in a special language called HTML,
for HyperText Markup Language.
There are really two distinct things going on in any HTML document:
- formatting of text and graphics for a nice appearance
and
- linking documents together for easy navigation
(the hypertext part).
In this section, we'll look at document formatting. The
next section covers linking them together.
Introduction
An HTML document is very simple really: it's just a plain text (i.e., ASCII)
file containing both words and HTML markup tags (or just
tags). The tags contain information telling any browser reading
the document how the words should be formatted.
Below we'll look at the "simplest possible" HTML document, and then we'll
enhance it as we learn a few of the basic tags. In a lot of ways, this just
paraphrases the document
A Beginner's Guide to HTML maintained at NCSA, which is
highly recommended reading.
The Minimal HTML Document
The truth is that a document containing only the text
Hello world!
would probably be viewed "correctly" by most Web browsers, but to be
"good" HTML, it should have a certain basic tag structure:
<html>
<head>
<title>The "Hello world!" Document</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello world!
</body>
<html>
Once you've got the basic structure in place, you can put whatever you want
between the body tags.
Basic Markup Tags
Let's just visit A Beginner's Guide to HTML for their
material on basic tags for
Author:
Jim McDonald
<jim@engr.trinity.edu>
Last modified: Thu Jul 20 22:55:33 1995