In this chapter, we will walk you through the basics of HTML. In Chapter 1, The World Wide Web, we already covered what the letters HTML mean, where the language comes from, and what it is used for: to create the content part of your web pages. We already know that this content is placed in between tags: <tag> to open and </tag> to close.

It would be beyond the scope of this book to provide a complete reference to all HTML tags, or elements (we will use these words interchangeably), and all of their attributes. There are some good references listed in the bibliography and of course there are some cool online references. I personally like w3schools.com but, if you don't, simply Google "HTML" followed by a tag name you would like to know more about and you will find some great alternate sources.

We will therefore only describe the most commonly used HTML tags in this chapter, grouped by the role they play in the document. For example, all the tags that can be used...