Chapter 2. Making a Web Page with HTML

In This Chapter

  • Getting started on coding your Web page

  • Adding body content

  • Creating bullet lists, numbered lists, and tables

  • Introducing style

  • Developing good coding practices

This chapter helps you understand the basics of HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML is the underlying code that makes all Web pages work in a browser. In this chapter, we deconstruct an HTML document and show some basics of how to create a Web page.

This chapter focuses on the most basic Web page layout, but there are many technologies that can be added to a site — and the code — to create much more complicated pages. HTML isn't able to use information from a database or to create any multimedia effects on its own. For that, you need other scripting and programming languages (covered in Book VI) and plug‐ins, such as Flash or QuickTime (covered in Book V).

Getting Acquainted with the Basic Parts of an HTML Document

The essential parts of an HTML document are pretty simple. Each HTML page consists of a head and a body that are contained in tags. In fact, all elements on an HTML page must be contained in tags. The absolute minimum tags needed are the HTML <head> and <body> tags, as shown here:

<html>
<head>Your header information goes here.</head>
<body>The content of your page goes here.</body>
</html>

Note that most tags travel in pairs. Each element has an opening tag (<html>, <head>, <body>) and a closing tag (</body>, </head>, </body>). The opening and closing of tags lets ...

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