Webmaster in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Chapter 3. HTML Reference

This section lists the known HTML tags and attributes currently available for use in web documents. There are many different browsers out there, and they do not all support the same set of tags.

Most up-to-date browsers implement nearly all of HTML 4.0. However, there are still some browser-specific tags and attributes that are not contained in the standard. The tag descriptions in this chapter use icons to indicate if an element is supported by either browser with respect to the standard (i.e., tags not contained in the standard but supported by both browsers will indicate as such). The two most popular browsers are considered here: Netscape Navigator, currently at Version 4.0 (

), and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Version 4.0 (

).

Core Attributes

Prior to HTML 4.0, there were few attributes that could be used consistently for all HTML tags. HTML 4.0 changes this, defining a set of 16 core attributes that can be applied to almost all the tags in the language. For brevity, we list these core attributes in this section and spare you the redundancies in the table that follows:

class=name

Specify a style class controlling the appearance of the tag’s contents.

dir=dir

Specify the rendering direction for text, either left to right (ltr) or right to left (rtl ...