When a web browser downloads a document, it scans the file for snippets of text called tags. These tags tell the browser how to display the file to the person.
Tags have four main components to them:
- Opening Tag
- Attributes
- Actual Content
- Closing Tag
An example of a tag could look similar to:
Backups are often underutilized by beginning webmasters. Once you have your web site up and running, the next step is to schedule backups on your data. You should create a backup schedule based on the frequency you update your web site. If you only update your site once a month, it seems counter-productive to have hourly backups. Although if you update your site every day, having daily backups make sense. One motto to live by is "When in doubt, backup!".
So you have your site all set up? Now you want to know who is visiting and what they are looking at. You want to be able to see that content is popular This is where statistic programs come in. Statistic programs keep track of the who,what, where and how aspects of your site.
Before you can advertise your website, it's probably a good idea to purchase a domain name. Whenever you go to a popular website like Google or Amazon, you are typing in their domain name not the actual computer's name. The main purpose of using a domain name is so we do not have to memorize IP addresses. Who would want to remember that 66.135.221.11 is an IP address to get to Ebay.com? Domain names make it easier for humans to remember web site addresses.
We have now established that you open and close tags using the less-than and greater-then symbols. But what if you wanted to use these characters in your web page, without the browser trying to format it correctly.
Say you have a financial site and you enclose all your stock ticker symbols in these tags(i.e <GOOG>). How does the browser know what is and what isn't a tag? Simple we use an alternative set of symbols for the characters HTML uses.
In order to create links to other web pages, we need to use the <a> tag. This tag (short for anchor) is used to create links between other sites, your own site and links to a certain part of a web page. Using the <a> tag, you can also make links out of text and images.
The three main types of links:
There are three main ways to change the colors being displayed on the screen: Hexadecimal, RGB and color names. The easiest one of these three is just using the color name.
Color Names
Using color names is by far the easiest method of adding color to your web pages. The only problem with this method is that it only supports a limited number of colors. Most "root" colors like: white, black, blue, yellow, cyan are supported. Another benefit is that most newer browsers will even render variants of the "root" colors.
An example would be:
There are three methods of creating lists in HTML: ordered (numbered), unordered (bullets) and definition lists (dictionary style). Each one is also customizable . You can use numbers, roman numerals, bullet points or even images for the list.
- <ol> - Ordered lists
- <ul> - Unordered lists
- <dl> - Definition lists
Also each line within the list (i.e list item) must contain a <li> tag.
What if you wanted to create a horizontal line going across the screen to break up text even more. This is what the <hr /> tag was made for. Using a <hr /> tag will by default draw a black line across the screen.
Note: Just like line breaks (i.e the <br /> tag), the <hr /> tag has no closing tag.
Line breaks are a little different from the other tags mentioned so far. Line breaks can be thought of as pressing ENTER in a text editor, the cursor moves down to the start of a new line. You use the <br /> tag to create a line break.
Line breaks in HTML are also different in the fact that they can't contain any content. that is why we close them within the same tag by using a />. In the past we could just use <br> to create a line break, but since the web is moving towards XHTML, we need to use the XHTML standard of closing every tag.
