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Basic HTML -- 10 Simple Tags Worth Knowing

This simple guide to HTML explains to the beginner how to create a quick and easy Web page.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. An HTML page has markup tags that tell a Web browser how to display that page. A page often is divided into a header, body and footer.

You can create a page in a text editor such as Notepad or SimpleText, as well as an advanced Web editor.

Ten basic tags to get started are:

  1. <html> -- the tag that tells the browser it is displaying an HTML document.
  2. <head> -- header information, which is not displayed in the browser.
  3. <title> -- the title of the document, which is displayed at the top of the browser.
  4. <body> -- the main body of the document, which will be displayed in the main browser window.
  5. <p> -- a paragraph symbol
  6. <i> -- italic
  7. <b> - bold
  8. <table> -- the table tag
  9. <tr> -- the table row tag
  10. <td> -- the table data cell tag

Here is a simple starter page:

<html>
<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>

<body>
<p>This is my first homepage. <>>This phrase is in italic</i> while </b>this phrase is in bold. </b> </p>

<table>
<tr>
<td>This sentence is in a table cell.</td>
<td> This one is in another table cell on the same row.</td>
</tr>
</table>

</body>
</html>

Note that each starting tag has a corresponding end tag but with a slash added. So the <html> tag that starts the page also has a </html> that ends the tag.

Build the above sample in your word processor, save it to your desktop as sample.html and open it in your browser to see the result.