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Yes,
yes, but what is HTML made of?
I mentioned
that HTML is an application of SGML. This means that every HTML
document is also an SGML document. The first thing an SGML document
must have is a Document Type Declaration. This means exactly what
it sounds like: a Document Type Declaration declares the document
to be of a specific type. In our case this type is HTML. I won't
go into much depth on Document Type Declarations right now. For
the moment, you should use the following declaration:
Do
not let the angle brackets confuse you. The above is not an element.
If you look carefully, you'll notice that the content of the above
construct starts with an exclamation mark; this indicates that this
is SGML code. And after looking at it a bit you might be glad you
don't have to learn SGML. So just take me on my word for this once,
and put this at the top of your document. In a future tutorial,
we'll explain what this Document Type Declaration means and show
that it's really quite simple.
Now
that we have specified that this is an HTML document, we can start
adding elements. The first element will always be the HTML element.
All HTML documents have an HTML element, which contains all the
other elements. Let's put in the start-tag and end-tag for this
element and we'll worry about its contents later. Here's what we've
got so far:
Every
HTML document is split into a head and a body, which are marked
by similarily named elements, HEAD and BODY. Every HTML document
must have one of each, inside the HTML element. In fact, these two
are the only things you can have inside the HTML element. So let's
put these in as well and see where we are:
Notice
that I've used a slight indent for the HEAD and BODY element tags.
This has no special meaning and is only there to make the HTML more
legible. You might have noticed that white-space (that is, spaces,
tabs and linefeeds) is collapsed in HTML. This means you can add
as much of it as you want to, in order to make your HTML easier
to read, without any change in the meaning of the document.
The
difference between the head and body of a document is that the head
contains mostly information about the document, while the body contains
the document itself. Before we go on to the body, we'll deal with
the one element every document head must contain: a title.
The
title of your document is very important. It distinguishes your
document and makes it unique, as well as describing it to the reader.
In this case, the title "Acme Computer Corp." is unsuitable, because
it doesn't describe our document. A more descriptive title would
be "About Acme Computer Corp.", but since this is the world of marketing
and we can't afford to be bland, we'll give it a title of "Acme
Computer Corp.: Who We Are".
The
TITLE element is a very simple element. It cannot contain anything
but text and that text is the title of the document. So let's insert
our title into our document, which is almost complete:
More About HTML
HTML
Author
Elements of HTML
Paragraphs and Headings
What is HTML Made Of
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