HTML Elements
Tags are used to provide structure to a webpage. The tags identify different elements of a page. There is normally a start and end tag for each element.
Most tags use this structure, but there are exceptions. For example the line break tag <br> does not need a closing tag.
The browser will look at the tag and decide for itself how to format that element in the browser. In the early days of the World Wide Web, different browsers used different formatting from each other, so you would never know what your page might look like. However eventually an agreed set of standards* was developed.
Common Elements
We have already used this to make our simple example web page.
Below are a list of common elements that are used when creating a web page.
<html> - The HTML element indicates that the content is written using HTML code
<head> - The <head> is a hidden section of HTML code that the web browser looks at first before displaying the body of the webpage in the browsers window
<title> - The <title> is the text that appears at the top of the browser window (or tab) to identify the web page.
<body> - The <body contains all the parts of the webpage that will be displayed in the browser window
<h1> - Defines the most important heading.
<h2> - Defines the second level of headings
<p> - Defines a paragraph. Browsers often add space after each paragraph.
<a> - Defines a hyper-link. This link will not work without a href attribute.
<strong> - Identifies text that is important (often displayed as bold text)
<em> - Identifies text that needs emphasising (often displayed in italics)