The Essential Tags

There are four sets of HTML tags that you will need in every HTML document:

  • <html></html>
  • <head></head>
  • <title></title>
  • <body></body>
Definition - <html></html>
This basically defines the document as web page. It also identifies the beginning and end of the HTML document. All other tags must fall between the html tags.
Header - <head></head>
The header contains information about the document that will not appear on the actual page, such as the title of the document, the author, which stylesheet to use and also meta tags.
Title - <title></title>
The title tag defines the title that will appear in the title bar of your web browser. The title must appear between the head tags.
Body - <body></body>
The body tags contain all the information and other visible content on the page. All your images, links and plain text must go between the <body> and </body> tags.

Example:

Below is a basic html document. Notice that everything falls between the html tags, the title appears within the head of the document, and that the body comes after the head.

Click here to see the example. it will be opened in a new browser window.

<html>
 <head>
  <title>this is the title</title>
 </head>
 <body>
  this is everything that goes in the document!
 </body>
</html>
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