HTML defines three tags that are used to describe the page's overall structure and provide some simple header information. These three tags<html>, <head>, and <body>identify your page to browsers or HTML tools. They also provide simple information about the page (such as its title or its author) before loading the entire thing. The page structure tags don't affect what the page looks like when it's displayed; they're only there to help tools that interpret or filter HTML files. In the strict HTML definition, these tags are optional. If your page does not contain them, browsers usually can read the page anyway. These tags, however, are required elements in XHTML 1.0. The most recent browsers already take advantage of XHTML. You should get into the habit of including the page structure tags now.
The <html> TagThe first page structure tag in every HTML page is the <html> tag. It indicates that the content of this file is in the HTML language. In the XHTML 1.0 recommendation, the <html> tag should follow the DOCTYPE identifier (as mentioned in the previous note) as shown in the following example. All the text and HTML elements in your web page should be placed within the beginning and ending HTML tags, like this: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/transitional.dtd"> <html> ...your page... </html> Before XHTML 1.0, you could play fast and loose with the tags in your documents. In order for your HTML to be valid, you needed to include the <html> tag around all the other tags in your document, but none of the popular browsers cared if you really did. If you left them out, or included the beginning <html> tag but not the closing tag, or whatever, the browser would still display the document without complaining. With XHTML 1.0, your HTML documents must also be valid XML documents, so the rules are much more strict. XML documents require all the elements in a file to be enclosed within a root element. In XHTML 1.0 documents, the root element is the <html> tag. The <head> TagThe <head> tag specifies that the lines within the opening and closing tag are the prologue to the rest of the file. Generally, only a few tags go into the <head> portion of the page (most notably, the page title, described later). You should never put any of the text of your page into the header (between <head> tags). Here's a typical example of how you properly use the <head> tag (you'll learn about <title> later): <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/transitional.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>This is the Title. It will be explained later on</title> </head> ...your page... </html> The <body> TagThe remainder of your HTML page (represented in the following example as ...your page...) is enclosed within a <body> tag. This includes all the text and other content (links, pictures, and so on). In combination with the <html> and <head> tags, your code resembles the following: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/transitional.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>This is the Title. It will be explained later on</title> </head> <body> ...your page... </body> </html> You might notice here that each HTML tag is nested. That is, both <body> and </body> tags go inside both <html> tags; the same with both <head> tags. All HTML tags work this way, forming individual nested sections of text. You should be careful never to overlap tags. That is, never do something like the following: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/transitional.dtd"> <html> <head> <body> </head> </body> </html> Whenever you close an HTML tag, make sure that you're closing the most recent unclosed tag. (You'll learn more about closing tags as you go on.) Note In HTML 4.0 and earlier, some tags are optionally closed. In other tags, closing tags are forbidden. In the XHTML 1.0 recommendation, all tags must be closed. If you're just learning HTML, this won't be a big deal, but if you already have a passing familiarity with the language, this might surprise you. The examples shown in this book display the proper way to close tags so that older browsers will interpret XHTML 1.0 closures correctly. |