Elements Of Tags

Common XHTML Tags

The following are some facts about HTML and XHTML tags:

• Web pages are just plain text. You can view or edit the source code using any text editor.
• "Tags" provide web browsers with instructions about the web page, such as where to display images, and how the document is structured.
• Tags are always enclosed in angle brackets: < >.
• Tags are comprised of elements and attributes. An element is an object on a page (such as a heading, paragraph, or image), and attributes are qualities that describe that element (such as width and height).
• Tags usually travel in pairs. An opening tag begins a section of page content, and a closing tag ends it. For example, to markup a section of text as a paragraph, you would open the paragraph with an opening paragraph tag <p> and close it with a closing paragraph tag </p> (closing tags always proceed the element with a /).
• A few tags are called non-container tags, because they don't contain any content - they stand alone. Examples are images and line breaks. XHTML requires that all open tags must be closed, even if they're not container tags. Therefore, non-container tags end in />. For example, the tag for a line break is <br />.
• Tags in HTML are not case sensitive, but in XHTML all tags must be in lower case. Even when coding in HTML, you should get in the habit of writing tags in lower case.
• White space is ignored by web browsers. So, if you hit the space bar multiple times within a document, only one of those spaces will actually be displayed by the browser.
• Tags can be nested. For example, <em> <strong>this text is italicized and bold</strong> </em>. Note that the order of nested tags is important: The container tags surrounding any content should be symmetrical.