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HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition
book

HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

by Chuck Musciano, Bill Kennedy
October 2006
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
680 pages
21h 44m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Structure of an HTML Document

HTML and XHTML documents consist of text, which defines the content of the document, and tags, which define the structure and appearance of the document. The structure of an HTML document is simple, consisting of an outer <html> tag enclosing the document:[*]

<html>
<head>
<title>Barebones HTML Document</title>
</head>
<body>
This illustrates, in a very <i>simp</i>le way,
the basic structure of an HTML document.
</body>
</html>

Most documents have a head and a body, delimited by the <head> and <body> tags. The head is where you give your document a title and where you indicate other parameters the browser may use when displaying the document. The body is where you put the actual contents of the document. This includes the text for display and document-control markers (tags) that advise the browser how to display the text. Tags also reference special-effects files, including graphics and sound, and indicate the hotspots (hyperlinks and anchors) that link your document to other documents.

[*] The structure of an XHTML document is slightly more complicated, as we detail in Chapter 16.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596527322Errata Page