Creating Web Sites Bible, Third Edition

Chapter 4. HTML Building Blocks

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating a Web page using HTML

• Head and body sections

• Block-level elements

• HTML tools

• Designing a simple Web page

• Logical and physical elements

• Special characters and encoding schemes: ASCII and Unicode

• Element quick reference

This chapter provides you with a basic introduction to the building blocks of Web page design. We review the structure of a basic Web page by introducing the head and body block elements and explaining what each part does. In the head block, we present and discuss metatags, comments tags, title tags, and functions. We next present the body section, where we explain the purpose and function of the tags used to mark up document content. We then introduce some commonly used body tags and explain how they are used to contain and format the document content. Some of the tags used to do this are paragraph tags, heading tags, list tags, inline tags (such as image tags), and empty tags (such as those used to create horizontal lines).

This chapter also discusses the difference between virtual and physical tags.

We conclude the chapter with a discussion of ASCII and Unicode.

Creating a Web Page Using HTML

The image shown in Figure 4-1 is a Web page. If you want to see "what it is made of," you may do either of the following. Go to the View menu on the standard toolbar in Internet Explorer, click on it, and then select source from the drop-down menu, as shown in Figure 4-2. Note that in Internet Explorer 7 you may need to first press ...