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Introduction
"Tags" are just the cute name for commands in HTML. Tags aren't so hard to
use, as long as you follow a few simple rules. Donald St. John of CNET laid
out five rules for tags which should help you understand them better:
- Tags are always surrounded by angle brackets (less-than/greater-than characters), as in <head>.
- Most tags come in pairs and surround the material they affect.
They work like a light switch: the first tag turns the action on, and the
second turns it off (There are some exceptions. For instance, the <br>
tag creates a blank line and doesn't have an "off switch." Once you've
made a line break, you can't unmake it.).
- The second tag--the "off switch"--always starts with a forward slash.
For example, you turn on bold with <strong>, shout your piece, and
then go back to regular text with </strong>.
- First tag on, last tag off.
Tags can be nested, so when you start a tag
within another tag, you have to close that inner tag before closing the
outer tag. For instance, the page will not display properly with the tags
in this order:
<head><title>Your text</head></title>
The correct order is:
<head><title>Your text</title></head>
- Many tags have optional attributes that use values to modify the tag's
behavior.
The <p> (paragraph) tag's align attribute, for instance, lets
you change the default (left) paragraph alignment. For example, you could centers the next paragraph on the page with the following tag.
<p align="center">
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