In this HTML tutorial you will learn how to use HTML to create your own Web site.

HTML Tutorial: HTML Elements

HTML Elements


HTML documents are text files made up of HTML
elements.


HTML elements are defined using HTML tags.



HTML Tags



  • HTML tags are used to mark-up HTML elements
  • HTML tags are surrounded by the two characters < and
    >
  • The surrounding characters are called angle brackets
  • HTML tags normally come in pairs like <b> and
    </b>
  • The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second
    tag is the end tag
  • The text between the start and end tags is the element
    content
  • HTML tags are not case sensitive, <b> means
    the same as <B>



HTML Elements


Remember the HTML example from the previous page:









<html>
<head>
<title>Title of page</title>
</head>
<body>
This is my first homepage. <b>This text is bold</b>
</body>
</html>

This is an HTML element:









<b>This text is bold</b>

The HTML element starts with a start tag: <b>

The content of the HTML element is: This text is bold

The HTML element ends with an end tag: </b>


The purpose of the <b> tag is to define an HTML element
that should be displayed as bold.


This is also an HTML element:









<body>
This is my first homepage. <b>This text is bold</b>
</body>

This HTML element starts with the start tag <body>, and
ends with the end tag </body>.


The purpose of the <body> tag is to define the HTML
element that contains the body of the HTML document.



Why do We Use Lowercase Tags?


We have just said that HTML tags are not case sensitive:
<B> means the same as <b>. If you surf the Web, you will notice that
plenty of web sites use uppercase HTML tags in their source code. We always use
lowercase tags. Why?


If you want to follow the latest web standards, you should
always use lowercase tags. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends
lowercase tags in their HTML 4 recommendation, and XHTML (the next generation
HTML) demands lowercase tags.


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