moose web power

Exploring and Using
Web Design Code

Tag Basics

In the Beginning

   If you ever read the code that generates a webpage, you will recognize some words, even sentences and paragraphs, but for the most part it will look like a foriegn language. Some characters will like math symbols, others will appear as an over use of punctuation, and much of it will look like nonesensible abbreviations. Of course you are correct in all accounts. While a techie may say that a webpage is like a Word document with some additional code to anhance the appearances, ultimately the enhancing code fills the majority of the page. Hence the foriegn language appearance. At first the coding is generated by tags; more advanced coding goes into many more advanced coding processes.

   The simplest of tags may be placed before and after a word, phrase or sentence to give a particular appearance. For example, a tag <strong> before a word or phrase followed by a closing tag or ending tag </strong> will cause the word or all the words in the phrase to appear bold. Another pair of tags, <p> and </p>, define a pargraph.

   Tags quickly become more complex as attributes are added to further define or refine a tag. For example with the <img>, which inserts an image into the page, and by the way has no closing or ending tag, resources a code to tell the browser where to find the image. It might also include attributes of width and height. It may appear something like this: <img src="images/picture.jpg" width="100" height="75">.

   A consistantly reliable source of information about HTML tags is the website w3schools.com.

tag crowd