Basic Web Page
A basic web page has two parts. The head which contains all the background information and the body which is the web page itself. Click here and open the sample page. Select view source to view the html. Notice two items at the beginning an exclamation tag and an HTML tag. '!' are comment tags that allow the designer to insert information without it showing on the screen. Most items proceeded by an exclamation point are ignored by the browser.
Tags are instructions to the web browser you are using. They are always contained in brackets '<>' and almost invariably have an open and a close. The open and close are the same word but the close is preceded by a slash '/' symbol. The first tag, the HTML tag, tells the browser this is a web page written in Hyper Text Markup Language and to start processing the instructions.
The <head> tag opens up the background information for the page such as title and meta (information) tags. The title appears in the bar at the very top of the browser right next to the logo. The meta tags are comments from the designer such as keywords, copyright information, and in some cases page attributes. The </head> tag ends the preliminaries.
The <body> tag is where the browser begins writing the page. Everything enclosed in the body tag is written on the screen. So, the sentence "This is a sample page." is written as the first item on the page. The </body> tag ends the writing portion and the </html> tag ends the page and tells the browser it is done.
