The Basic Structure of Web Pages

Web pages range from dull to dynamic, inane to indispensable, but they all have the same underlying structure. This consistent structure—which, as you'll see, is nothing more than a small collection of HTML tags—is the reason why almost all browser programs running on almost all types of computers can successfully display almost all Web pages.

HTML files always start with the <HTML> tag. This tag doesn't do much except tell any Web browser that tries to read the file that it's dealing with a file that contains HTML codes. Similarly, the last line in your document will always be the </HTML> tag, which you can think of as the HTML equivalent of “The End.”

The next items in the HTML tag catalog serve to divide the ...

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