Structure Submenu

The Structure submenu contains eight commands. For more information on how the first six of these commands are used to create a structured HTML document, see the section Document Structure.

All Structural Tags
Adds all of the tags shown below to the current document. 

Language
The <HTML> and </HTML> tags are placed at the beginning and end of your document to mark your text as an HTML document. If the Use SGML Prologue check box (as found in Editor Preferences) is checked, will prefix the document with the SGML prologue text as specified on the Preferences card.

Header
A section beginning <HEAD> and ending </HEAD>, which precedes the actual content of your document is a document header, and may contain information to assist the browser software. By placing the <BODY> tag at the end of the HTML.edit Header area (but still after the </HEAD> tag), the Master Headers may be used to create a common beginning to each document.

Note that no document content should occur within the <HEAD> tags, only browser information such as a document title.

Title
The HTML Title is used by client software (like Lynx or Mosaic) to title the window of the currently displayed document, or maintain a history list of browsed documents. Select the text you wish to use as the HTML document title, then choose the Title command from the HyperText menu. The <TITLE> tags will be added to enclose the desired title text.

Body
The content of your document is contained within the <BODY> and </BODY> tags.

Footer Delimiter
If you wish to provide a consistent footer to your documents, use the Master Footers to create one. While there is no HTML tag used to designate a document footer, HTML.edit provides a "legal" way to optionally separate the footer from your main content using an HTML comment:

  <!--FOOT-->

While not an actual HTML section, the addition of this HTML comment (as specified in Editor Preferences), allows HTML.edit to automatically transfer all document text following the comment to the HTML.edit footer area.

This is useful when exporting and importing text from HTML.edit, as the import feature can optionally move the footer text to the footer area on import if it finds the delimiter tag. Remember that even if you use the footer delimiter, the closing </BODY> tag must still occur after  all of your footer text. See Document Structure for more information on placement of structural elements.

BASE/BASE Utility
The BASE element creates a URL reference point within the document, both for recording the document's own URL (to allow relative addressing of links within the document in situations when the document may be read out of context). This reduces the maintenance burden of moving a set of documents to a new location. BASE may reference either a location or a specific document, depending on context.*

To insert a <BASE> element into your text, choose the BASE command. If the server name, server path (location of the server application), and the current document is located within the server folder, the BASE element specifying the current document will be inserted into the Header. For more information on setting the server name and path, check Paths and Filenames.

Alternately, place the insertion point into your document, then choose the Base Utility… command to display the Base Utility, from where you can specify the BASE element manually.

*NOTE: The possible uses of the BASE element are, as of this date, still under discussion in the HTML working group. The HTML 2.0 and 3.0 drafts limit the use of BASE to recording of the document URL for purposes of relative link resolution.  The use of the BASE element to reference a relative reference point other than the document base address is not currently proposed. Also, as some HTTP servers consist of a database that composes HTML files on demand, it may be said that some documents don't truly exist until created on the fly. For these servers the base URL may not be the "best source" of the document, which may change continuously (such as a stock market report). But for purposes of stored "static" documents, I believe that HTML.edit's implementation of BASE follows the HTML 2.0 draft.

META
The META element is used to provide an extensible container of document meta-information, to be used to notify search engines, web spiders, etc. of the existence of, content and/or qualities of the document. Note that META should not be used to provide information that is already supplied more appropriately by an existing HTML element, such as TITLE.

For example, the HTML.edit Keywords facility (located under the Utility menu) allows simple collection of document keywords. If the Keywords field contains any text, choosing the META command then defaults to setting up the META element as a source of keywords for the document, using the keywords field as its content, such as:

  <META NAME="resource-type" CONTENT=document>
  <META NAME="description" CONTENT="text description">
  <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3">
  <META NAME="distribution" CONTENT=global>

To insert a <META> element into your text, choose the META command. The popup menu ("HTTP-EQUIV") on the displayed dialog box shows some of the possible uses of META.

And a note from the HTML 2.0 draft:

NOTE:  The method by which the server extracts document meta-information is unspecified and not mandatory. The <META> element only provides an extensible mechanism for identifying and embedding document meta-information -- how it may be used is up to the individual server implementation and the HTML user agent. 

ISINDEX
The ISINDEX element is a flag informing the client that the document is an index document, and is capable of being searched. The server must have a search engine in order for this to work; merely adding the tag will not make this happen.

To insert an <ISINDEX> element into your text, place the insertion point into your document, then choose the ISINDEX command.

Horizontal Rule
A Horizontal Rule produces a horizontal line or separator the width of the browser window.

To insert a horizontal rule <HR> code into your text, place the insertion point into your document, then choose the Horizontal Rule command.

Back to Hypertext menu, on to Format submenu, or return to Tool Palette Menus.