Getting Started with HTML

HTML files are really text files with a different extension (.html or .htm, either will work). To get started, open your text editor (Notepad is fine for Windows users).

A few tags are required in every HTML file. First is the html tag (my newer interactive HTML tutorial on 3DM Design Dev Journal lets you see these tags in action), all other tags are surrounded by the opening and closing html tags in a file. Then there is a head tag and a body tag, which are used to describe the header and body of the file respectively. This is what it looks like so far, with these tags in place:

<html> <head> </head> <body> </body> </html>

Only information in the body will be displayed in the browser. The header serves other functions, such as providing a place to title the page with the title tag. The text inside the title tag is displayed at the top of the browser window and sometimes listed in the results provided by search engines as the name of the page. Here's what it looks like with the title tag:

<html> <head> <title>HTML Tutorial</title> </head> <body> </body> </html>

All content for the page goes inbetween the body tags. So to display some text on the page, you could do something like this:

<html> <head> <title>HTML Tutorial</title> </head> <body> <p>All content (such as this sentence) for the page goes inbetween the body tags.</p> </body> </html>

To fit more content on the page, simply insert it between the body tags with the rest of the content. Content is rendered top-down, so what appears first in the file will appear first on the page. Now that you have seen the basic structure of an HTML file, we can take a look at the tags used for handling text.

Next Step: Using Text

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