This is meant to be an introduction to some of the very basic
tags that you might use in creating or editing an HTML web
page. If you become familiar with these basic tags, you
will be able to view and edit some of the tags that make up
the HTML code on your web pages.
An HTML document consists of text and tags. Text goes between
the tags that specify how this text will look on the web
page. For example, if you put the word “Text” between <B>
and </B> tags, it will look bold.
Other text formatting tags include:
<I>Your Text</I> (Italics )
<U>Your Text</U> (Underlined)
<H1>Your Text</H1> (Large size heading)
There are others for formatting text, but these are the most
used ones.
The font tags, <FONT>…</FONT>, allow you to set sizes, face,
and colors of the text that is inside the tags. For
instance, <FONT size=”3″ color=”red” face=”Tahoma”>My
Text</FONT>, will make “My Text” size 3, Tahoma, and red
color. You can also specify color in hexadecimal code,
which allows you to specify an exact color. Take a look at
http://www.december.com/html/spec/colorchips.html to get the
hex code for a lot of different shades of colors.
In addition to formatting tags, there are HTML tags that
define a document structure. Some of them are :
<HTML>..</HTML> (signifies the start and the end of an HTML
document)
<HEAD>…</HEAD> (document header contains title, author,
keywords
and description)
<BODY>…</BODY> (contains all the objects of the document,
such as
text, links and pictures)
There are also tags that create special objects:
<TABLE>…</TABLE> (creates a table on your web page)
<HR> (makes a horizontal line)
Most tags consist of two parts – opening and closing. An
exception here is the <HR> tag. A few others don’t need to
be closed either:
<P> (new paragraph) and <BR> (new line, or break)
Many tags can contain extra information about them
(attributes). For example,
<BODY> tag can also specify a background color of the page
like this:
<BODY BGCOLOR=”PINK”>
A <TABLE> tag can also specify width like this:
<TABLE WIDTH=80%>
This tag inserts a graphic into your web page: <img src=”http:
//www.mywebsite.com/headerlogo.gif>
This tag makes a link to another web page: <A HREF=http://www.CheapMembershipSite.com/Mall>.
To make the link open in a new browser window, add “target=
“_blank”, like this:
<A HREF=”http://www.HomeBiz.GrabMyDeal.com” target=
“_blank”>
This tag: <A href=”http://ecomand1.thirdsphereplus.com/”
target=_blank>Thirdsphere Web Hosting</A>, will create a
link that opens in a new window, and the text “Thirdsphere
Web Hosting” would show on your web page as a clickable link.
How to place an image and text side-by-side, to give your web
page a more balanced look, and to make use of all white
space:
Recall we talked about the <IMG SRC=…> tag? Simply put an
align=left or
align=right inside it like this:
<img src=myimage.gif align=left width=100 height=200>
Right after the image tag start typing your text. The graphic
will automatically be displayed to the left of text. You
could create a table and put a picture and text in two
separate columns, but this is much faster to do and if your
text is long enough it will wrap around the graphic which
can’t be achieved using a table.
If the graphic is too close to the text, you may adjust it by
adding two more attributes to the tag – vertical space and
horizontal space, like this: <img src=ebay.gif align=left
hspace=5 vspace=5 width=100 height=200>
Well, that’s enough for now. Stay tuned for more HTML tips
and tricks.
Lewis Poteet
