Structure tags define the basic HTML document.

<html>
</html>

An HTML document begins with this tag. This is a paired tag, but the closing tag is not required. It is recommended, however, that you use it.

The tag simply tells the browser that this is an HTML page to be displayed in the browser window.

For the rest of the lecture, I will be showing code for an HTML document. The code will be in BLUE. If you are not familiar with HTML, it would be advisable to build and view the file as we go along. To do that, enter the blue text into a text editor, and save the file with an "htm" or "html" extension. Then, double-click on the file from Windows Explorer. This will open the HTML document in your default browser (either Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator).

Note: Once the HTML document is loaded in your browser, you can simply Refresh (IE) or Reload (NN) the document without closing the browser, after you've made changes.

The simplest HTML document would look like this: 

  <html>
  </html>
<head>
</head>

<body>
</body>

 An HTML document is divided into two parts- the head and the body.

The head contains information about the document. 

The body contains what will appear in the browser window.

So, we will expand our HTML document to look like this:

  <html>
    <head>
    </head>
    <body>
    </body>
  </html>
 <title>
</title>		 For now, we will talk about only one of the many tags that belong in the <head> section.

Any text between the opening and closing <title> tags will appear in the browser title bar. 

Note: You cannot use any of the other tags we will be discussing inside the title tag. The rest of the tags we will discuss belong in the body section. They are presented in the next lectures.

So, we will expand our HTML document to look like this:

  <html>
    <head>
      <title>This is my first HTML document</head>
    </head>
    <body>
    </body>
  </html>