Of Tags and Properties
In the preceding example—and, indeed, in the HTML of any web page you examine—you’ll notice that most commands appear in pairs surrounding a block of text or other commands.
These bracketed commands, like the <p> command that denotes the beginning of a paragraph, constitute the “markup” part of HTML (hypertext markup language) and are called tags. Sandwiched between brackets, tags are simply instructions that tell a web browser how to display a page.
The starting tag of each pair tells the browser where the instruction begins, and the closing tag tells it where the instruction ends. A closing tag always includes a forward slash (/) after the first bracket symbol (<), so the closing tag for the paragraph command above is </p>.
Fortunately, Dreamweaver can generate all these tags automatically. You don’t have to memorize or even type them in (although many programmers still enjoy doing so for greater control). Behind the scenes, Dreamweaver’s all-consuming mission is to convert your visual design into underlying code, like this:
The <html> tag appears once at the beginning of a web page and again (with an added closing slash) at the end. This tells a browser that the information between these two tags is written in HTML, as opposed to some other language. All the contents of the page, including any other tags, appear between these opening and closing <html> tags.
If you were to think of a web page as a tree, the <html> tag would be its trunk. Springing from the trunk ...
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