Introduction to HTML and Types of Tags

INTRODUCTION

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is text markup language used to create HTML documents (Web Pages) for The Internet. HTML is a set of logical codes or tags (markup) that are used to define the Web browser how to present the information in the Web page.

It can be applied and embedded in the text to add formatting, linking that constitute the appearance of the Web documents and the information. It is interpreted by the Web browser. The Web browser is software that runs on the Web client (user computer ) and it interprets HTML tags to display the contents of the Web page.

Fig. HTML

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HTML is platform independent language. It is not a programming language like C, C++, java and BASIC.

Basically, it is a set of markup tags that tells the browser how to display the Web page content.

Some popular markup languages are DHTML, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), XHTML (Extended HTML),XML (Extensible Markup Language), etc.

Tim Berners Lee developed HTML in 1990, at CERN (Conseil Europeenne pour la Recherche Nucleaire ), the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

There are different versions of HTML; these are HTML, HTML+, HTML 1.0, HTML 2.0, HTML 3.2, HTML 4.01 (It has accessibility of Cascading Style sheet, and Multimedia) and now HTML 5.0 ( It has accessibility of local storage and offline database).

Uses of HTML

1. It is used for basic layout creating or designing the Web page.
2. Without HTML, the World Wide Web will not exist.
3. It allows embedding text, image, multimedia (audio / video) and links to other documents and the Web pages.
4. It provides a means to create structured document by using paragraph, character formatting, links and lists.
5. It can embed scripts such as CSS, JavaScript, which affect the behavior and design of the Web page.

Advantages of using HTML

1. It is highly flexible and user-friendly.
2. It is an open technology that supports almost all the Web browser and platforms like MS-Windows, Macintosh, UNIS, etc.
3. It is efficient and reliable. You can create the Web page in order to advertise and promote products and services.
4. It is easily understandable and does not require long time training.
5. It provides search engine compatible to the Web sites.

Disadvantages of using HTML

1. It is complex to design attractive Web page only using HTML. So, other languages are used for additional programming.
2. It is difficult to develop a complete Web Site by using only HTML. Web development tools like Dreamweaver, Foundation are used.
3. It cannot be used to develop a dynamic Web page.
4. There is no any complete acceptable standard of HTML.
5. There are many incompatibilities of HTML.

HTML Tags

HTML is made up of different tags and attributes. The tag is an HTML command that shows the layout or displays the desired output of a whole or part of the Web page. HTML tag is bound by angular brackets ( < > ) that always opens with a < (less than ) sign and closes with a > (greater than) sign. It controls the appearance, layout and flow of the Web page.

A tag contains three parts: element (identification of tag), attribute and value.

The basic structure of tag is:

text

e.g. Computer

Here, is the beginning tag and is the ending tag.

HTML tags can be of two types:

1. Paired Tags
2. Singular Tags

1. Paired Tags

It is also called container tag. A tag is said to a paired tag if it along with a companion tag or closing tag appears at the end. For example, the tag is paired tag. The tag with its closing tag is used to rendered in Bold Text. In paired tag, first tag is called the opening tag and the second tag is called the closing tag.

2. Singular Tags

The second type of tag is the singular tag, which is also known as a stand-alone tag or empty tag. The stand-alone tag does not have companion tag or closing tag.

For example : Other singular tags are:

Meta Tag

The Meta tag is one of the head elements. Meta tag is used to make the Website or its content searchable on the WWW or internet. This tag offers information about page or description about page or author of page or keyword that is relevant to that page. Actually, it is used for search engine information. The search engine interacts with the Meta tag of the HTML page at first.

Basic Structure of HTML Document

The HTML document is mainly divided into two sections. They are: Head section and Body section.

Head section is used as the first tag of any web page which signifies that it is beginning of web page.It has some elements that define header materials. It gives a descriptive title to a document. The HTML 4.0 for many good reasons requires a use of the tag. Titles show up in browser windows title bars and in bookmark and history listings. In each of these cases, one provides an important reader service when one specifies a title because the browser will display just the document’s URL. The remaining HTML elements are contained within.

Here’s the example of basic structure of HTML

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Creating Webpage

We can prepare a web page in any text editor (e.g. notepad, word pad). After typing contents of the web page, we need to save a page with an extension of HTML. The prepared web page now can be viewed using a browser like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera, etc. While typing contents of the webpage, it can be in any case. HTML is not case-sensitive like HTML and HTML are same.

Comments in HTML

The comment tag is used to insert a comment in the HTML source code. The browser will not display comment. We can use a comment to explain tag / code, which can help us when we edit the source code later.

<!—This is comment à

Comment tag requires ! after opening bracket, but not before the closing bracket.

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(Shrestha, Manandhar and Roshan, Computer Essentials)

Bibliography

Shrestha, Prachanda Ram, et al. Computer Essentials. Kathmandu: Asmita's Publication, 2014.

Adhikari, Deepal et.al. Computer Science- XI, Asia Publication Pvt. Ltd, ktm