Section 2
THE MINIMUM HTML DOCUMENT TAGS EXPLAINED 
     Here is the minimum I recommend using for an HTML document:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>You would put a title here</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
You would put the Text of your document here and any embedded HTML tags
</BODY>
</HTML>
     The <HTML> and </HTML> tags tell the web browser where an HTML
document starts and ends.  Without the <HTML> tag you would end up with
just a plain old ordinary text document.
     The <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags tell the browser where the Document Header
begins and ends.  Several items can be entered between these tags to tell
the web browser specific information about the current web page.  Search
Engines can also use some information found in the Header to list your web
page.  But, for a simple web page, the only one you really need to include
is the Title.
     Here again the web browser is told where the Title starts and ends
with the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags.  The text you enter between these tags
does not actually show up on your web page when someone views it.  Instead,
it is the text that the web browser would store when someone bookmarks the
page in their browser.  Often this will also be displayed at the top of
their web browser screen while they are viewing your web page.  You should
keep this text to less than 100 characters, and preferably less than 64
characters.  Make sure what you enter here will make sense to the user
later when he looks back at his bookmark list so he will know exactly what
that specific web page was about.
     With all that out of the way, we finally get to the real heart of a
web page.  What the user actually sees on his screen is what is placed
between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags.  Although some things can be placed
outside of these tags, it just makes more sense to me to put all the good
stuff inside the Body tags.  You would put whatever text you want displayed
here, and can also enter (or embed) other HTML tags for such things as Font
Style/Size, Forground/Background Colors, Graphics, and even Music/Sounds.
     One thing you should note here about entering Text is that almost all
web browsers will ignore extra spaces (unless given specific HTML tags not
to) and will only show a single space between words.  So, if you tried to
enter a line of Text like this:
This     line     is    spaced     out.
     It would actually end up looking like this to the viewer:
This line is spaced out.
     Which, of course, is not how you wanted it to look.  If you want to do
a fancy looking layout that is spaced out, you will need to learn some of
the more advanced HTML tags (which I probably will not be covering in this
tutorial).
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© 1999 miltst@hotmail.com
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(This page was last modified on: Monday, February 08, 1999)
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