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Basic Tags
Creating a Basic Document

Tutorial by Yamrot
Tuesday April 1, 2003

To create your own website you must first learn the definition of the terms we will be using. HTML: Hyper Text Markup Language. <HTML> tags are instructions to Web browsers on how they should format and display the different parts of a Web page. <TITLE>: This tag is used to add a title to the top of your Web page. The second tag, which is called the end tag, tells the browser where to turn off the function. The one difference between a start tag and an end tag is that the end tag has a slash in it like this </>.

Now, let's begin to hard-code texts.
</HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Your page's Title goes right here</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Here, you place your page's main information
</BODY>
</HTML>

The first tag in every HTML document is <HTML> and the last tag is </HTML>.The </HTML> tag tells the Web browser that all the information that follows, the <HTML> tag should be treated as a Web page and the </HTML> tag tells the browser where the page stops.

After the <HTML> tag the <HEAD> tag follows. The purpose of the HEAD section is to provide general information about a particular Web page, but this information is not actually displayed in the page's body. The BODY section then follows the head. The BODY section is where you place all of your Web page's information.

After you finish each and every Web page you create, save it as a HTML document (.html or .htm). If you're not sure how to save it, here is how you do it: in your notepad or word document window click File then Save As and then name your first page as index.html. To check if it works, double click on your file, and Tada!

In order to add a line break you need to use the tag. What I like about this tag is that it does not have an ending tag therefore you don't have to worry about adding an ending tag. There is no tag. Unlike the tag, the tag does not insert a blank line between each line of text.

The <HR> tag allows you to add a horizontal line to the body of your Web page. The Horizontal Lines (Rules) can visibly break your page into sections. Most of the time, a good place to add a horizontal line is at the bottom of your Web page.

One thing I should inform you about is the alignment tag. When you put your information in the body tag, your information automatically aligns to the left. Therefore, use this tag to align your text in the center of the page and use to align your information to the right. Keep in mind that Web browsers automatically place your text to the left unless you tell the browsers to change the alignment.

Hyperlinks

In order to understand how hyperlinks work, you must first undertand URLs which stand for Uniform Resource Locators). The format of a URL is

protocol://server address/path/filename Ex. http://www.yahoo.com

Protocol: in your URLs is HTTP, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. URL is an addressing system which makes it easier for people to find the one specific file that they are looking for. Each and every single file on the Web has its own different address which is called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

Coming back to Hyperlinks, most Web pages that I have seen so far have had hyperlinks. Hyperlinks allow you to jump from Web page to Web page around the world just by clikcing your mouse. In order to add a hyperlink to your Web page, you should use the following HTML code:

HREF: stands for Hypertext Reference. This tag establishes a link to another Web page and no matter where you are, with just a click of a mouse, you can access the Web page.