<HTML> Elements & Tags

Any markup language separates a document into two main categories:

Content, such as the text you write and images you include.
Content identifiers (known as "elements" in HTML) that classify the content according to the content type, such as paragraph, header, list, and table.

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the first and dominant markup language for documents on the Web (yes, the future holds others). The HTML language is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3), a group of over 500 companies that decide, among other things, what elements should and should not be in HTML, as well as what future markup languages and protocols the web might use.

In spite of the fact that there are billions of web pages out there, the HTML used to create those documents consists of just a little over 90 content identifiers (hard to believe, but see the W3 List of HTML Elements yourself)

HTML elements, which are defined by HTML tags, can be one of two types:

Empty elements, which only have an opening tag, such as the paragraph <P> tag:

<P>This is a paragraph, which continues until the next HTML element is found.

Container elements, which have both an opening and closing tag and contain the content.

Container elements are explicitly ended with by the same tag, but with a "/" backslash preceding the element name. For example:

<H1>This is a Header</H1>	The </H1> explicity ends the <H1> element. That means the contents "contained" between the <H1> and the </H1> is a Header 1.
<B>This text is bolded</B>, and this text is not.	The /B explicitly ends the B element (bold). That means that the contents contained between the <B> and the </B> is bolded.
<TABLE></TABLE>	Tables are complex HTML structures that require many different elements to define (as you will see later in this course). But all of those elements are contained within the <TABLE> element, and the table is explicitly ended with the </TABLE> tag.

Terminology Note: The word element typically refers to the function, whether it is an empty or container element. For example, the P element or the H1 element. The H1 element refers to the entire function, which includes <H1></H1>. The word tag, on the other hand, typically refers to a single instance of a "<tag>". Thus, the H1 element consists of two tags, <H1> and </H1>.

Some container elements have optional ending elements (yeah I know, a bit confusing but I need to make you aware of it). The examples above must be explicitly ended. But others have an implied ending. For example, a Table Row consists of:

<TR> this first tag begins the Table Row
</TR> this second tag explicitly ends the Table Row

That is a single table row. However, the table row ending can be implied by the next Table Row, or by the ending of the table:

<TR>
<TR> this second tag starts a new Table Row, implicitly ending the previous Table Row

Course Note: To help alleviate some confusion, this course only discusses the explicit ending tags.

The collection of HTML elements and the content are stored in a single file called an HTML file (usually with a filetype .htm or .html). An HTML file is simply a text file. That means that special format files, such as graphics files, can't actually be inserted into an HTML file.

So, how do graphics, sounds, programs, and other information types get included into an HTML document? By HTML elements that point to those other files, which then get combined with the HTML file by the Web browser...

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