A HTML tag is a keyword (or letter) enclosed in
greater-than and less-than characters. The text in the
tag is not case sensitive. For example to make a word
bold you'd write:
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<b>the
word</b> |
Note that this tag is binary (there are two parts) -
the start tag <b> and the end tag </b>.
The slash "/" signifies the end of the binary
page. This idea of begin and end markers should be
familiar to anyone who has used a primitive
word-processor! Only the text inside the tags is effected
by the tag. Tags can be placed within other tags, and in
fact in most HTML documents start and end with the HTML
tag, so most of the text is "inside" the <html>
... </html> binary tag.
Most tags are binary, but some are unary: they have
only one part. An example of a unary tag is the break tag
<br> (this forces the browser to start a new
line). To complicate matters, some binary tags are used
as if they were unary. The most common tag is the start
paragraph tag <p>, there is an end paragraph
tag </p> that strictly speaking should be
used at the end of every paragraph. In fact, very few
people bother with the end paragraph tag and most
browsers don’t require it!
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HTML Reference
