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TERMS

There are a few common terms which I will use again and again. I'll just quickly define them here.

Content
The actual 'meat' of a document -- all of the words, images, and links which a user can read and interact with. I use this term a lot to mean "whatever you put in the document."

Hyperlink
A link from one document to another, or to any resource, or within a document. For example, just above where its says "Beginner's Web Glossary" and that text is highlighted in some fashion. The default is usually blue, underlined text, but your display may vary.

In-line
Almost always used in the context "in-line image," this refers to a resource of some type which is placed directly into a document. As I say, this is nearly always an image, but the future could see things like in-line animations.

URL
The Uniform Resource Locator is a "standard" way of easily expressing the location and data type of a resource. URLs in general take the form "protocol://address" where protocol is something like gopher, FTP, telnet, and so on, and the address is merely the server and pathname (if any) of a given resource or page.

HTML: Behind the Scenes

HTML is composed of tags. HTML tags are always enclosed in angle-brackets ( < > ) and are case-insensitive; that is, it doesn't matter whether you type them in upper or lower case. I almost always use upper case, because it makes the tags easier to pick out in a document, but that's just me. You can do whatever you like.
Tags typically occur in begin-end pairs. These pairs are in the form

    <tag> ..... </tag>

where the <tag> indicates the beginning of a tag-pair, and the indicates the end. (The three dots indicate an arbitrary amount of content between the tags.) The usual way to refer to each tag is "tag" for the first and "slash-tag" for the second, where tag is the actual name of the tag being discussed.

These pairs define containers. Any content within a container has the rules of that container applied to it. For example, the text within a "boldface container" would be boldfaced. Similarly, paragraphs are defined using a "paragraph container."

Thinking of tag-sets as containers will help in another way: it will help you remember that tags should always be balanced. In other words, you should keep containers nested within each other, just as you would have to do in the real world. Let's try some visual examples where we actually draw the containers:

  Correct                Incorrect
  ___tag1                ___tag1
  |                      |
  |  __tag2              | __tag2
  |  |                   | |
  |  |__tag2             |_|_tag1
  |                        |
  |___tag1                 |_tag2

One more thing to keep in mind with regards to containers. Since HTML is based on these structures, it is often the case that the arrangement of text within a container is irrelevant. For example, within a paragraph container, all of the text can be in one long line, or in a series of separate lines, or with every word on its own line, or with every word separated from every other by nineteen spaces. These would all be displayed exactly the same.

Therefore, try to keep in mind this thought: whitespace doesn't matter. (Whitespace is all of the blank areas in a text file--empty lines, extra spaces, and so on.) I'll mention this again when discussing the paragraph tag, and it will crop up in other places. Again: whitespace doesn't matter.

Having said all that, I will now attempt to muddy the waters a bit by mentioning that not every tag in HTML is paired. Some tags, such as the line-break tag, stand on their own (that is, they have no closing tag). These are known as empty tags. As we encounter them, I'll point them out.

By "document tags," I mean the tags which divide up a Web page into its basic sections, such as the header information and the part of the page which contains the displayed text and graphics. This may seem confusing right now. Just hang on.

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