August's Crash Course

August's HTML Crash Course - Structure

This is a bit of a poorly named section, but I couldn't think of a better one. Why is it poorly named? Well, quite simply because HTML is a structural language. That means that just about every aspect of it is somehow going to relate to the structure of your page. That also means that this could turn into a very big section, and could be very, very tedious for me to code, and it could be very, very tedious to read. But hey, I'm going to do my best not to let that happen. How? Well, I'm going to break up a lot of the things that could fall into this section, and put them in sections of their own.

Let's start right at the beginning: tags. Tags are little bits of code that look like this: <TAG>. They always fall between angle brackets, and usually come in pairs, one opening and one closing. The tag in red above is what the opening tags look like, and the closing tags look like this: </TAG>. Oh, and just in case you didn't see me mention it before [or in case I forgot to mention it before], every time I give a piece of code, it will look like this. Notice how the colour and font change? Good, they're supposed to. If they don't, e-mail me at august@vestige.org and let me know. After all, I can't fix bugs if I don't know about them. One last thing I should mention about tags before we go on to specific ones. Tags are not case sensetive. You can type them as capital letters, or lowercase letters, or... well, I think those are your only options. But they are options. In this tutorial, I will be writing all my codes with capital letters. This is how I code when I do pages for myself. I do this because I find it easier to pick out the code from the main body of the text that way. If you have a text editor that lets you display certain things in other colours, then go ahead and use it - I almost wish I had one [actually I prefer the black and white interface of Notepad, but most designers I know don't, and like the different colours instead - it's just a matter of taste].

Probably the most ignored tag in all of HTML is the DOCTYPE tag. The reason it's ignored is because it more or less does nothing. At the moment, anyway. Rumor has it that when version 6.0 of the major browsers finally come out the tag will be very important. What the tag does, is tells your browser what kind of document it's viewing, and what version of HTML the page is written in. The idea is that the browser will then adjust itself accordingly to display the code correctly. This doesn't work. At all. But there are rumors floating around that it may happen soon, so I'm going to show you how to use the tag anyway.

The DOCTYPE tag in it's entirety looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN">

The tag itself is pretty confusing; it's got a big mess of information that looks kind of like Greek. Don't worry about it right now. All you need to know at this stage, is that it tells your browser what kind of document this is [an HTML document], and what version of HTML is being used [in this case 4.0 Transitional]. What you do is make sure this tag is the very first thing in your HTML document. And then you can move on to the <HTML> tag.

c: august@vestige.org h: http://www.vestige.org