Essential HTML Tags

There are four sets of HTML tags that are needed to form the basic structure for every HTML file:

  • <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.

These four tags are special. There must only be one set of each and they must be in the correct order like in the example below. The fun and creative part comes when using the basic tags for adding content and headings.

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.

<html>
 <head>
  <title>My Page Title</title>
 </head>
 <body>

  This is where all my web page content goes!

 </body>
</html>

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