Microsoft® Manual of Style, Fourth Edition

HTML tag, element, and attribute formatting

Elements vs. tags

An element includes the tags, the attributes, and the content, if any. For example, consider the following:

<h1 align=“center”>This is a heading</h1>

In this example, the H1 element consists of the start tag (<h1>), including the align attribute, the “center” value of the align attribute, the content (“This is a heading”), and the end tag (</h1>).

Some elements, such as META and IMG (image), do not have start and end tags; they only have a single tag with attributes.

Formatting guidelines

• Use all uppercase for element names, and surround the element name with the definite article the and element. Examples are the H1 element and the FONT element.

• Use angle brackets and lowercase for tags. Examples ...