How can you explain HTML tags to a person who is a novice to it?

Answer 1

The basic HTML tag has these parts: 1. An opening delimiter, the Attributes that set variables for the tag to determine how it works. Tags can be used without any attributes. 4. A closing delimiter, the > symbol. <TAGNAME attributes> A typical HTML tag might look something like this:

In this example, the tag is the Paragraph Tag and the attribute says that the paragraph will be centred. The tag starts with an opening delimiter and ends with a closing delimiter. The tagname and attribute are separated with a single space. Attributes are not always necessary and different combinations of these can be used depending on what you want a tag to do. Note in this case the word Center is spelt the American way. Most, but not all, tags have a corresponding closing tag. The closing tag always has a forward slash / inside it before the Tagname. Text between the opening and closing tags are effected by the formatting by the tag. This is bold text. The word bold between the two tags will be bolded while the other words will appear as normal. On the browser the text would look like this: This is bold text. If any attributes appear in the opening tag the closing tag will never include the attributes. For example the opening

tag shown earlier will later be closed at the end of the paragraph with a

tag. It will not include the Align=CenterWhen creating a tag, separate each element - the tag name and each of the attributes - with a single space. To use an attribute, type the attribute name, followed by an equal sign and the attribute value. Do not put a space between the attribute name, equal sign, or value. If you don't use an attribute, the browser uses the default value for that tag. For example, the default value for paragraph alignment is left. If you use the paragraph tag without the align attribute, the paragraph will be aligned to the left. Some tags stand alone or do not have a closing. For example, you can insert a horizontal line on the page with a single tag, like this:

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Tags are not case sensitive. For example means the same as ., >or will all behave in the same way. There are over 100 tags. However, some Tags do the exact same thing as other tags. For example , and can all be used to do the same thing. is most commonly used.
A HTML PAGE The basic template for a HTML Page is as follows: Most of the content of your page is in the BODY section The Document has two main areas, the HEAD and the BODY. The HEAD area contains basic information about your page like the Title or information about the author, the content or for Search Engines to identify the relevance of your Web Page to a search. If TITLE tags are included the text between these will appear in the title bar of the browser. As indicated above most of what you enter in a HTML page will be entered between the and tags. When the page is viewed in a browser, only what is specified in the BODY area will be displayed: Welcome to My Page In the above example only the words Welcome to My Page will appear in the browser when the web page is viewed. They will be bolded and centred. The words between the TITLE tags will appear in the title bar of the web page but not in the page itself. Note also that the tags are closed in the reverse order that they were opened in. This is the standard practice when creating HTML pages. If you see any of the HTML Tags or <or> appearing in the browser, there is an error in your page.

Answer 2

I have taught HTML to several people, each time I have said that HTML is a kind of robot which creates web pages. I then go on to say that you need to give the robot some instructions, these instructions appear in tags (<>) Anything OUTSIDE the tags, the robot will ignore and just throw onto the web page, anything INSIDE the tags the robot will endeavour to understand and change it into a command, process it etc.

Fairly complicated, but works every time!