Elements and Characters

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Many types of elements are in the body of a Web document. For example, block-level elements define structural content blocks such as paragraphs  or headings <h1> . Block-level elements generally introduce line breaks visually. Special forms of blocks such as unordered lists (<ul> ) can be used to create lists of information. Inline elements such as bold (  ), strong (  ), and numerous others occur within blocks. These types of elements do not introduce any returns. Other miscellaneous types of elements include those that reference other objects such as images ( <img> ) or programs ( <object> ). Other hard-to-characterize elements also could be grouped and defined, but often these are related to browser-specific elements such as <marquee> and are not part of the HTML specification, though they may be commonly used. In addition to grouping tags as block, inline, list, miscellaneous, and other, it is common to group HTML tags as logical or physical. Physical tags such as  describe the look of enclosed content, whereas logical tags such as  describe its meaning. The implication of the logical/physical grouping is significant and is discussed in more detail later in this chapter. However, the specific instances of each of these types of elements will not be discussed now but introduced in subsequent chapters, with the core elements discussed in Chapter 3.

Finally, within the elements in the body, you can type in regular text and insert special characters through the use of character entities. Occasionally, it might be necessary to put special characters within a document, such as accented letters , copyright symbols, or even the angle brackets used to enclose HTML elements. To use such characters in an HTML document, they must be "escaped" by using a special code. All character codes take the form & code; , in which code is a word or numeric code indicating the actual character that you want to put onscreen. For example, when adding a less than symbol, < , you could use < or <. Character entities also are discussed in Chapter 3, and a complete list of the character entities is presented in Appendix C.

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