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Main Tags ... The start and end of the page. All www-pages should use this tag, even though many browsers will draw the page as it should anyway. A page should have the following structure: ... ... ... Indicates the head-section of the page. The head-section of the page is not displayed in the browser. Tags used here set preferences of the pages, such as title or default textsize, or to define frames. See the Head tags-section, the Meta tags-section, the Stylesheets-chapter and the Frames-chapter for information on the tags that could appear here. The first part of a page often is the DOCTYPE-tag that describes the DTD (Document Type Declaration) that is used in the document. DOCTYPE is used before any other tags, including the HTML-tag. If the document contains HTML 2.0 code only, DOCTYPE should be . To just define that the content is HTML, use . DOCTYPE is not required, and not widely used, but there is no reason to not use it. HTML-validators, that verifies that the tags are written correctly, often requires DOCTYPE-tags. ... The body is the pages content. What is used between the tag and its end-tag will be displayed in the browser. Only one pair of BODY-tags is allowed in a page. The following properties can be used: BGCOLOR="color " Sets the background to specified color. Default color use to be gray, unless the user has changed it. BACKGROUND="url " Sets the background of the page to a specified picture, overriding the background color. If the picture is smaller than the page, it will be repeated as a pattern over the page. TEXT="color " Sets the standard color of the text, usually black. LINK="color " Sets the color of the links, usually blue. VLINK="color " Sets the color of the already visited links. Netscape, usually defaults to magenta while Explorer, uses red. ALINK="color " Sets the color of the links at the moment the user clicks on them, usually red. BGPROPERTIES="fixed" Defines BACKGROUND as a non-scrolling picture. IE LEFTMARGIN="n " Defines the left margin of the page, ie the number of pixels between the left border of the window and the page content. IE TOPMARGIN="n " Defines the top margin of the page. IE Head Tags These tags should be placed within the HEAD-section of the document, ie between and . text Sets the title of the page (usually the window name) to "text". Netscape 1.1N (no other browsers, no other versions of Netscape) can 'animate' the title by inserting more than one TITLE tag. Sets the default URL for relative URL:s used in the page. If BASE HREF is not used, URL:s are related to the location of the page itself. Use TARGET to set the default TARGET value, see the Appendix for more information. Used to set the default size, font and color of the text. FACE and COLOR are not yet supported in Netscape, the default color may instead be set in the BODY-tag. (IE) This will play a sound in the background while the page is open. The sound must be in the .au, .wav or .mid formats. LOOP is the number of times to play the sound if a number is given, or you may use "infinite" to play it over and over until the page is closed. Note! Because of a bug, Netscape Navigator 2.x will not display the page if BGSOUND is used. Don't use this tag if you think the vistors may be using Netscape Navigator 2.x. IE NS3 Tells the browser that the page is a searchable index. When the page is opened, a dialogbox will ask the user to enter a keyword. HREF is the url to which it will be sent. PROMPT is the text to be displayed in the dialog. If PROMPT is not defined, a text such as "You can search this index. Type the keyword(s) to search for:" will be displayed. Some sources says that you should use ACTION instead of HREF. This is a tag defined in the first HTML-standard, but it never became popular and there is no particular use for it. The idea was to indicate relationships with other sources. If this chapter was a webpage, we could use REV="toc" TITLE="table of contents" HREF="toc.html", to define a link and the reverse relationship to the toc.html-page. That page would then include a relative relationship to this page, like REL="chapter" TITLE="page structure" HREF="chapter1.html". As far as I know, no browser support this tag, but you may, if you wish, include information such as REV="author" TITLE="Calle Bäckström" HREF="mailto:carl.backstrom@gfk.se". If you want, you can use more than one LINK-tag. Defines global style sheets, please see the Style sheets-chapter for more. Code in a different language will follow, such as JavaScript or VisualBasic. SRC is the source to the file containing the script, if it's not within the current file. Note that old browsers does not recognize the SCRIPT-tag, and they will therefore display the code between the start and end tag. You may put the code in a comment, such as to hide the code in old browsers. Text within this tag will only show up in browsers that do not support the script-tag. See the Meta tags-section and the Frames-chapter for more tags that are used within the HEAD-tags. Meta Tags These tags should be placed within the HEAD-section of the document. They could have been listed in the Head tags-section of this chapter, but they are listed in its own section to make it easier to read. The META tag is used to give information to the browser or search engine. It should be placed within the HEAD tags. Many META-tags can be used. The following parameters can be used: HTTP-EQUIV="text " CONTENT="text " This is an addition or replacement of a header sent by the server software. A header is a part of the HTTP-protocol, which is used to transfer WWW-pages. A header can for example be the length of the page, the server software or the date when the page was last changed. A frequently used additional header is refresh, see below. HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="n [; URL=url ]" This will reload the page every n:th second. If URL is specified, that page will be opened instead of the current. This tag is often used in "welcome"-pages, or in webchats. Since not all browsers support this tag, a standard link to the page should also be used. HTTP-EQUIV="expires" CONTENT="day, date year time timezone " Some search engines won't keep the page content in the search datebase after this time. A newspaper may, for example, not want the search engine to keep a copy of an old placard. The content can be, as an example, "Sat, 06 Jan 1990 14:30:00 GMT". HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="mime-type [; charset=charset ]" This is useful if you wish to define another MIME-type than the server default settings, or when you use special characters that are not entities. You may then set CONTENT to "text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1". NAME="keywords" CONTENT="word1 ,word2..." This will tell a search engine such as AltaVista the searchable keywords of the page, for example "horses, riding". NAME="description" CONTENT="text " A short description of your page used by search engines, as an example. NAME="copyright" CONTENT="text " A short copyright description of the text, like "© Me 1997". NAME="distribution" CONTENT="global|local" Defines if the page is an index page (global) or not (local). NAME="moved" CONTENT="url " This tag is not defined in any standards, since I've added it by myself. HTML LinkChecker, a program I've made that verifies links between pages, will recognize pages with this tag as outdated pages, and notifies the user about it. If you've moved any page and leave a "Page has moved"-file in case someone has bookmarked the old page, you may use this tag if you want giving the full URL to the new location. If CONTENT is empty, HTML LinkChecker will report the page as removed. Any authors of similar programs may add support for the tag too, if you like. NAME="robots" CONTENT="none|nofollow|all|noindex" A way to tell search engines which pages that should be indexed. NOFOLLOW will index the present page only, NOINDEX will index linked pages only, ALL will index both the present and the linked pages and NONE won't index any pages at all. NAME="generator" CONTENT="text " This tag is often added by HTML-editors, indicating which program has that was used to create the page. NAME="language" CONTENT="language " Some search engines may take notice on this tag to figure out what language the page is written in, like French, English or Swedish. NAME="text " CONTENT="text " There are many other META-tags not mentioned here. You may virtually use any META-tag you want, just if there is any browser, search engine or similar that will care.