National Center for Supercomputing Applications
A Beginner's Guide to HTML

The Minimal HTML Document

Here is a bare-bones example of HTML: 

    <TITLE>The simplest HTML example</TITLE>
    <H1>This is a level-one heading</H1>
    Welcome to the world of HTML. 
    This is one paragraph.<P>
    And this is a second.<P>

Click here to see the formatted version of the example. 

HTML uses markup tags to tell the Web browser how to display the text. The above example uses: 

  • the <TITLE> tag (and corresponding </TITLE> tag), which specifies the title of the document 
  • the <H1> header tag (and corresponding </H1>) 
  • the <P> paragraph-separator tag 

HTML tags consist of a left angle bracket (<), (a "less than" symbol to mathematicians), followed by name of the tag and closed by a right angular bracket (>). Tags are usually paired, e.g. <H1> and </H1>. The ending tag looks just like the starting tag except a slash (/) precedes the text within the brackets. In the example,  <H1> tells the Web browser to start formatting a level-one heading; </H1> tells the browser that the heading is complete.
 
The primary exception to the pairing rule is the <P> tag. There is no such thing as </P>. 

NOTE: HTML is not case sensitive. <title> is equivalent to <TITLE> or <TiTlE>. 

Not all tags are supported by all World Wide Web browsers. If a browser does not support a tag, it just ignores it. 

back to Creating HTML Documents
on to Basic Markup Tags
return to Beginner's Guide  Contents.