Document Structure

What is an HTML structural tag?
These are HTML tags that provide no change of appearance to your document, but provide important information to the remote browser about your document. These elements may provide information about the type of document being transmitted, its title, whether it is an index to other documents, etc. In an environment where HTML is potentially only one document type of many (with even SGML browsers now becoming available), it is recommended that you use structural tags to identify your HTML documents.

The HTML specification does not require documents to use all HTML structural tags, but following closer to form makes for more compliance with HTML and SGML client browsers. Also, browsers are now becoming available that can download only the document header to allow you to determine if you want the rest of the document.

The Structure submenu (under the HyperText menu) includes the structural commands, as well as the commands found on the Header, Body and Footer popUp menus. You can add all the structural elements to a document at once by choosing the All Structural Tags command.

Document Structure
The first (but currently optional) element of an HTML document is the SGML prologue, a declaration of the language used in the document. This is in the form of an SGML "document type" element, the parameters point to a description of the HTML language in a DTD (Document Type Description) format. Note that the <!DOCTYPE> element has no ending "/" tag:

   <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN//2.0">

The beginning and end of an HTML document is marked with the HTML language tags <HTML> and </HTML>.

An HTML document header is delimited with the tags <HEAD> and </HEAD>. The document header contains information used by a browser program to navigate and keep track of document history, and shouldn't generally contain any document content, other than the document title and optional HTML comments.

All HTML documents should have a document title, enclosed by <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags. The document title should be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags.

The document body is delimited with the tags <BODY> and </BODY>.

The optional <!--FOOT > comment is used to separate the Body and Footer areas (used in HTML.edit only).

NOTE: All document content should occur within the body tags.

Sample
A sample structure is shown below, complete with divisions for Header, Body and Footer sections:

————————— start of Header area ——————————
<!DOCTYPE [etc.]>
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Document Title</TITLE>
</HEAD>
—————————— start of Body area ——————————
<BODY>

    Your document content goes here…

————————— start of Footer area ——————————
<!--FOOT >    [optional]
<ADDRESS>
    The author's address information goes here [optional].
</ADDRESS>
</BODY>
</HTML>
—————————— end of Footer area ——–––——————

Note that HTML.edit concatenates the Header+Body+Footer text areas on exported text files using the Export command, so you could put the entire contents of your file within any one of the text areas, and you would obtain the same effect. HTML.edit adds the HTML structure tags as shown above, and parses the text accordingly.

For related information, check the HyperText menu's Structure submenu.

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