HTML Tutorial
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, which is the most widely used language on Web to develop web pages.
HTML was created by Berners-Lee in late 1991 but "HTML 2.0" was the first standard HTML specification which was published in 1995. HTML 4.01 was a major version of HTML and it was published in late 1999. Though HTML 4.01 version is widely used but currently we are having HTML-5 version which is an extension to HTML 4.01, and this version was published in 2012.
This tutorial is designed for the aspiring Web Designers and Developers with a need to understand the HTML in enough detail along with its simple overview, and practical examples. This tutorial will give you enough ingredients to start with HTML from where you can take yourself at higher level of expertise.
Before proceeding with this tutorial you should have a basic working knowledge with Windows or Linux operating system, additionally you must be familiar with:
- Experience with any text editor like notepad, notepad++, or Editplus etc.
- How to create directories and files on your computer.
- How to navigate through different directories.
- How to type content in a file and save them on a computer.
- Understanding about images in different formats like JPEG, PNG format.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
<h1>Hello World!</h1>
</body>
</html>
HTML Overview
HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language, and it is the most widely used language to write Web Pages.
· Hypertext refers to the way in which Web pages (HTML documents) are linked together. Thus the link available on a webpage are called Hypertext.
· As its name suggests, HTML is a Markup Language which means you use HTML to simply "mark up" a text document with tags that tell a Web browser how to structure it to display.
Originally, HTML was developed with the intent of defining the structure of documents like headings, paragraphs, lists, and so forth to facilitate the sharing of scientific information between researchers.
Now, HTML is being widely used to format web pages with the help of different tags available in HTML language.
Basic HTML Document
In its simplest form, following is an example of an HTML document:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>This is document title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is a heading</h1>
<p>Document content goes here.....</p>
</body>
</html>
Either you can use Try it option available at the top right corner of the code box to check the result of this HTML code, or let's save it in an HTML file test.htmusing your favorite text editor. Finally open it using a web browser like Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, or Firefox etc. It must show the following output:
HTML TAGS
As told earlier, HTML is a markup language and makes use of various tags to format the content. These tags are enclosed within angle braces <Tag Name>. Except few tags, most of the tags have their corresponding closing tags. For example <html> has its closing tag </html> and <body> tag has its closing tag </body> tag etc.
Above example of HTML document uses folloiwng tags:
Tag | Description |
<!DOCTYPE...> | This tag defines the document type and HTML version. |
<html> | This tag encloses the complete HTML document and mainly comprises of document header which is represented by<head>...</head> and document body which is represented by <body>...</body> tags. |
<head> | This tag represents the document's header which can keep other HTML tags like <title>, <link> etc. |
<title> | The <title> tag is used inside the <head> tag to mention the document title. |
<body> | This tag represents the document's body which keeps other HTML tags like <h1>, <div>, <p> etc. |
<h1> | This tag represents the heading. |
<p> | This tag represents a paragraph. |
To learn HTML, you will need to study various tags and understand how do they behave while formatting a textual document. Learning HTML is simple as users have to learn the usage of different tags in order to format the text or images to make a beautiful webpage.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends to use lowercase tags starting from HTML 4.
HTML Document Structure
A typical HTML document will have following structure:
Document declaration tag
<html>
<head>
Document header related tags
</head>
<body>
Document body related tags
</body>
</html>
We will study all the header and body tags in subsequent chapters, for now let's see what is document declaration tag.
The <!DOCTYPE> Declaration
The <!DOCTYPE> declaration tag is used by the web browser to understand the version of the HTML used in the document. Current version of HTML is 5 and it makes use of the following declaration:
<!DOCTYPE html>
There are many other declaration types which can be used in HTML document depending on what version of HTML is being used. We will see more details on this while discussing <!DOCTYPE...> tag along with other HTML tags.
HTML Basic Tags
Heading Tags
Any document starts with a heading. You can use different sizes for your headings. HTML also has six levels of headings, which use the elements <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6>. While displaying any heading, browser adds one line before and one line after that heading.
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Heading Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is heading 1</h1>
<h2>This is heading 2</h2>
<h3>This is heading 3</h3>
<h4>This is heading 4</h4>
<h5>This is heading 5</h5>
<h6>This is heading 6</h6>
</body>
</html>
This will produce following result:
Paragraph Tag
The <p> tag offers a way to structure your text into different paragraphs. Each paragraph of text should go in between an opening <p> and a closing </p> tag as shown below in the example:
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Paragraph Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Here is a first paragraph of text.</p>
<p>Here is a second paragraph of text.</p>
<p>Here is a third paragraph of text.</p>
</body>
</html>
This will produce following result:
Here is a first paragraph of text.
Here is a second paragraph of text.
Here is a third paragraph of text.
Line Break Tag
Whenever you use the <br /> element, anything following it starts from the next line. This tag is an example of an empty element, where you do not need opening and closing tags, as there is nothing to go in between them.
The <br /> tag has a space between the characters br and the forward slash. If you omit this space, older browsers will have trouble rendering the line break, while if you miss the forward slash character and just use <br> it is not valid in XHTML
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Line Break Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello<br />
You delivered your assignment ontime.<br />
Thanks<br />
Mahnaz</p>
</body>
</html>
This will produce following result:
Hello
You delivered your assignment ontime.
Thanks
Mahnaz
Centering Content
You can use <center> tag to put any content in the center of the page or any table cell.
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Centring Content Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This text is not in the center.</p>
<center>
<p>This text is in the center.</p>
</center>
</body>
</html>
This will produce following result:
This text is not in the center.
This text is in the center.
Horizontal Lines
Horizontal lines are used to visually break up sections of a document. The <hr>tag creates a line from the current position in the document to the right margin and breaks the line accordingly.
For example you may want to give a line between two paragraphs as in the given example below:
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Horizontal Line Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is paragraph one and should be on top</p>
<hr />
<p>This is paragraph two and should be at bottom</p>
</body>
</html>
This will produce following result:
This is paragraph one and should be on top
This is paragraph two and should be at bottom
Again <hr /> tag is an example of the empty element, where you do not need opening and closing tags, as there is nothing to go in between them.
The <hr /> element has a space between the characters hr and the forward slash. If you omit this space, older browsers will have trouble rendering the horizontak line, while if you miss the forward slash character and just use <hr> it is not valid in XHTML
Preserve Formatting
Sometimes you want your text to follow the exact format of how it is written in the HTML document. In those cases, you can use the preformatted tag <pre>.
Any text between the opening <pre> tag and the closing </pre> tag will preserve the formatting of the source document.
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Preserve Formatting Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<pre>
function testFunction( strText ){
alert (strText)
}
</pre>
</body>
</html>
This will produce following result:
function testFunction( strText ){
alert (strText)
}
Try using same code without keeping it inside <pre>...</pre> tags
Nonbreaking Spaces
Suppose you want to use the phrase "12 Angry Men." Here you would not want a browser to split the "12, Angry" and "Men" across two lines:
An example of this technique appears in the movie "12 Angry Men."
In cases where you do not want the client browser to break text, you should use a nonbreaking space entity instead of a normal space. For example, when coding the "12 Angry Men" in a paragraph, you should use something similar to the following code:
Example
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Nonbreaking Spaces Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>An example of this technique appears in the movie "12 Angry Men."</p>
</body>
</html>
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