The HTML opening tag signifies to the browser what type of document it is reading.
The commands inside the HEAD tag are the first commands to be used by your browser.
The title tags enclose the title of the specific document.
The body tags enclose the entire body of the page (all things that are visible to the visitor, basically).

< h t m l >

The HTML tag is used to simply signify that the document uses the language HTML.

< h e a d >

The head tag encloses the commands to be sent to the browser first. Some things that go inside the head tag are your title and the meta data you have, as well as all CSS Style Sheets information.

< t i t l e >...< / t i t l e >

The title tag surrounds the text to appear at the top bar of the browser. Look at the top of your browser now. See where it says "The Slacker's Guide to HTML: The Basics of HTML and web design..."? That's my title to this page.

< m e t a >

Promotion w/ Meta Tags

The meta tag has a variety of uses. The meta tag is used primarily to instruct search engine "spiders" on what to do with your page when they spider over them. It also is the tag used to cause a page to "refresh", or automatically reload and open up a new URL.

Here are the elements used in a meta tag:

The keyword element states that the page concerns hockey and baseball, and if someone does a search for those 2 words, that your page should come up as a search result.

Tells search engines when your page should be deleted from it's directory.

Tells search engines the description of your page.

Tells them who made the page.

Tells the search engine to visit your site again in 30 days.

Tells the search engin that your site is meant for everyone, and that it can be distributed globally. You can also specify "local" and "IU". IU means Internal Use, which means that it's basically not meant for the public.

There are some other META tags, also. Check out these "robot" tags that tell search engines whether or no to index the page, and whether or not to index pages that are linked to. There are many combinations of the robot tag. *Not all search engines can handle the robot tags as of now, but I'm sure they all will soon. It can't hurt to use them.

And you can put all these together by just lining them up like so:

After the meta tag is finished (it requires no closing tag), you must
close the head tag by inserting

< / h e a d >

...in your document. That will end the list of commands that the browser will execute first.

< b o d y >

The body tag has a very lot of uses. It specifies the default properties of all the body of the page, including text, link, visited link, active link, and background colors, background images, and page margins. Here are some examples and descriptions of each element in this tag:

The body tag, when left alone like above, will instruct the browser to display the default properties (black text, white or grey background, and on and on). There are many additions and revisions to the body tag you can use, though. Here they are:

That specifies the background color of your page. You replace the 6 pound symbols with an alphanumeric hex code. You can download this program that tells you hex codes for countless colors for free from us to you!.

The above tag specifies that an image will be used as a back ground. You put the name of the image in the spot reading "image- name.extension". If a file is titled "frog" and is saved as a .gif, then that above code would appear as:

so you see you have the option of creating your own backgrounds or using a simple color background. If you have a background image that simply runs down the left or right of your page and you do not want your text to run over the image, then simply box your pages text and content into a table that has a set width which will keep it from running over the background image and align the table to whatever side of the page the background image does not lie on.

The element used to fix the background (IE4 and IE3.02 Only!) so that it does not tile (or repeat), like a background usually will, is:

bg properties="fixed"

The element of the body tag which sets the default text color is:

text="######"

That tag can be changed just as the bgcolor tag can.

link="######"

vlink="######"

alink="######"

These three tags do the same thing as the text color tag, only they change the default link, visited link, and active link colors, respectively.

leftmargin/topmargin="#"

The margin tags, which as of now work only for Internet Explorer by Microsoft, set the length that all the body will stay from the top or left of the browser. By putting a pixel number into the area where the pound symbol is you set the length in pixels that the body of the page will be from the side of the screen.

In order to tie all of these elements in together to form a correct body tag, just line them up like so:

<body bgcolor="000000" text="FFFFFF" link="ABCDEF" vlink="680GAE" alink="JI7AFE" bgproperties="fixed" leftmargin="200" topmargin="100">

You now know all of the necessities of starting up a page. While I might call these necessities, they are not all needed. The meta tag, the title tag, head, and body tag can all be left out but you will have a very generic page.

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