Intro to HTML
Every web site has the same basic skeleton. The basic elements are doctype, html, head, title, and body. If you have all these elements, then you have a web page.
This is the skeleton of a web page:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <title>Your Title Here (this is important)</title> </head> <body> This is the part of the webpage that people see. </body> </html>
Please copy this and paste it when you create a web page from scratch.
This markup has the following elements:
1. Doctype
This tells the web browser that it’s opening a web page.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
2. html
This tells the browser that your web page is html (hypertext markup language).
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
3. head and title
The head element tells the browser to use English. The title element is what you see at the very top of your web browser. It also is the text that is used when you bookmark a site. It is the most important information used when Google indexes your site.
<head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <title>Untitled Document</title> </head>
4. body
This is the actual site that people see. If you type “fsndofhsd” in the body element, your web page will display “fsndofhsd”. You can add many other markup elements to the body element.
<body> </body>
If you want to manually create a web page (without an authoring program like Dreamweaver or WordPress), the minimum markup you need is this:
<html> <head> <title>Untitled Document</title> </head> <body> </body> </html>
In a pinch, I’ve typed this in. It definitely works, but this is not best practices for web design.
