Fundamental HTML Tags @ OWDC

LESSON 1-02: Fundamental HTML Tags

Web Design Lessons > Lesson 1-02: Fundamental HTML Tags

Previous Lesson | Lesson Index | Next Lesson

HTML codes consist of functions which are refered to as "tags". It is these "tags" that allow you to format your text to make it bold, italic, large or small. HTML tags do not only deal with text formatting, of course. HTML contains tags for diverse purposes in order to define the layout of a web page and link to other documents. We are going to learn a great deal of HTML tags as we continue our free online web design course.

HTML tags are written between "<" and ">" characters. So, everything inbetween these characters on a web page is interpreted as a tag. The most fundamental HTML tags are probably <html> and </html>. These tags set the starting and ending points of an HTML document. Many HTML functions span only a limited area, meaning they have a starting and an ending point. In HTML, the starting tags are have "<" and ">" whereas the ending tags have an additional "/".

HTML documents consist of a "head" part and a "body" part, indicated by <head></head> and <body></body> tags respectively.

The "head" part is defined inbetween the <head> and </head> tags and contains special information about the HTML document itself and does not have anything to do with how the document (i.e. web page) is displayed. We'll cover the head part more thoroughly in later lessons of this free online web design course.

The "body" part is defined inbetween the <body> and </body> tags and contains the actual content of the web page and controls how it looks. This is where the actual coding happens.

So, if we look at the source HTML code of a web page by right clicking and selecting "view source" from the menu, we'll generally get this structure:

As shown above, the area between the <head> and </head> tags is reserved fo the "head" content; while the area between the <body> and </body> tags is reserved for the "body" content. We'll explore both sections in greater detail as we progress through our web design course.

Sidenote #1: Check out my web design resources page to download a superb eBook!

Sidenote #2: If you enjoyed this lesson, please link to it :)

Now that you've learned the fundamental structure of an HTML document, we can move onto the next lesson of our free online web design course to learn how to do some basic text formatting with HTML. Let's click on!

Previous Lesson | Lesson Index | Next Lesson

Nearby Lessons:

• Lesson 1-00 A Little Bit of History
• Lesson 1-01 Introduction To HTML
• Lesson 1-02 Fundamental HTML Tags
• Lesson 1-03 Basic Text Formatting
• Lesson 1-04 Web Colors Unleashed

Back To Top

FUNDAMENTAL HTML TAGS!